Hey wait, wasn't there a short movie with this exact same title and premise? Made by the guy who illustrated for light novels such as Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song and I Want To Eat Your Pancreas? Indeed, loundraw's debut film Summer Ghost not only got a manga adaptation, but a novel adaptation as well, both of which are going to be released in the US sometime this August thanks to Seven Seas Entertainment. I saw and liked Summer Ghost, enough that I bought the blu-ray, and am definitely looking forward to owning both the manga and novel when they come out. But I did read a scanlated version of the manga in advance just to see how it adapts the film. I was convinced the manga would just be a one-to-one rehash of the movie, since most manga versions of movies tend to do that (As was the case with Josee, The Tiger, and the Fish), though not always. But after actually reading the manga, I'm genuinely surprised and pleased with what the manga decided to expand on compared to the movie, even if I don't always agree with some of its decisions.

The premise is the exact same as the movie, but for the uninitiated, here's a refresher. Summer Ghost centers on three high schoolers: Tomoya Sugisaki, Aoi Harukawa, and Ryou Kobayashi, who are all very different from one another and are going through their own struggles. Tomoya's controlling mother disapproves of his desire to paint and wants him to focus only on his studies. Aoi is being bullied at school, and attempted suicide once, and Ryou found out he doesn't have much longer to live. But all of them have one thing in common: They're interested in meeting the supposed summer ghost, said to be the ghost of a woman who committed suicide. After spending some time lighting fireworks, they manage to meet said summer ghost—a red haired woman named Ayane Satou. Mission fulfilled, Aoi and Ryou go back to their lives, but Tomoya begins seeing her alone, and after learning more about her, he, Aoi, and Ryou find themselves looking into just what happened to Ayane to make her like this, sorting through their own issues in the process.

When I say the manga expanded on the movie, what I mean is that the manga adds entirely new scenes that weren't present in the movie. While I liked the characters in the movie, it was a 40-minute film that didn't really flesh them out a whole lot, and I had wished that more had been done with them. The manga somewhat remedies this by adding in some extra scenes of the trio spending time together. One scene shows Ryou teaching Aoi how to play basketball and the two of them getting to know one another better, which was really cute. Another scene the manga added involving the two of them shows them skipping school and almost getting caught by truancy officers, managing to throw them off while laughing about the whole thing, which added some levity to an otherwise serious story. The characters' circumstances are also slightly expanded on more here. While the story still doesn't explain exactly why Aoi is being bullied, the manga adds in some details on her background such as her planning to go someplace so she can commit suicide (Where exactly, it doesn't explain) and that her parents fight on what seems to be a regular basis. Tomoya benefits the most from this, as I mentioned in my review of the movie that I found his angst a little too overwrought. The manga goes into more detail as to just how controlling his mother is, making her even more of a jackass to him than she was depicted in the movie. Seriously, the manga has her coldly admit to Tomoya that she threw away all of his art supplies and show that she really couldn't care less about him as a person, making his angst a lot more understandable. Ayane even gets a little more personality to her, being a bit more blunt and exasperated, not liking the fact that her death was made into an urban legend.

Even the way they help Ayane in the end and Tomoya's internal crisis are played out very differently from the movie, though I won't spoil it here. The core premise of Summer Ghost remains the same, but the manga is significantly longer than the movie in terms of the material it not only adapts but fleshes out, allowing for slightly more freedom in its storytelling. But not every decision the manga makes manages to hit a home run. For as much as I liked the extra scenes the manga gave Ryou, I didn't like how he treated Aoi after storming off after his argument with Tomoya. In the movie, Aoi tells Ryou about the bullying she's dealing with, along with trying to console him over both his incoming death and his attitude toward Tomoya, and Ryou feels remorse over storming off on him. But in the manga, when Aoi tells him about what she went through, he coldly dismisses her and treats her no differently than how the bullies did, which the manga implies is his way of trying to push her away so she won't have to deal with the pain of his death. Aoi and Ryou wind up getting into an argument of their own, and Ryou continues to berate her even when she's trying to be there for him. Granted, they do patch things up after the fact, so their conflict doesn't last long, but I really don't feel making Ryou into a jackass towards Aoi—the person who he spent a lot of his time with and considers a friend—and adding onto her insecurities was necessary, as his outburst towards Tomoya was enough. This just felt like unnecessary angst thrown in for the sake of making the manga longer, and it really didn't need that.

As for the art, it's okay. Compared to the movie, the artwork in the manga is a little more polished and less angular, and there's quite a bit of exaggerated chibi faces here, which the movie didn't have. The manga uses a lot of gray tones, and for stuff like backgrounds or texture, the mangaka uses a lot of lines and vector dot patterns for shading, and I'm not quite sure how to feel about its constant usage of dot patterns. It doesn't really stand out compared to other manga I've read, but Summer Ghost's art does its job. Nothing noteworthy, but definitely not bad. Plus, there is some creative use of paneling, and since manga don't really have a lot of restrictions compared to movies in terms of content, it's able to get away with doing more, like even showing Ayane's overall fate in more visceral and even graphic detail. In the end, the manga adaptation of Summer Ghost does a fairly good job at not only adapting the movie in a comic format, but even expanding on elements that the movie left ambiguous, even if I feel it could have done more. I don't know if the expansions made here were loundraw's idea or the mangaka's idea, and again, I'm not a fan of the manga making Ryou a lot meaner than he was in the movie. But I still enjoyed reading the Summer Ghost manga, and I still plan on buying it along with the novel when they come out in August, and I'm curious to see the novel's take on Summer Ghost and how it adapts the movie.