Name: An incredible way to experience Evangelion for the first time, a second time.
Item: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Rating: 90
Author: ekdsc

Waifra

An incredible way to experience Evangelion for the first time, a second time. · Waifora

Let me preface this with - if you haven't seen the anime, I can't really say if you'll enjoy it less or not, but you'll certainly be unable to appreciate a lot of what it does with the source material. I'll also be running on the assumption you've actually watched the anime first, because it's hard to talk about this manga at all if you haven't, and you really, really should! So, unmarked spoilers for that abound from this point forward.

The Neon Genesis Evangelion manga is, to oversimplify, a loose adaptation of episodes 1 - 24 as well as End of Evangelion. Most of the context is the same, the series hits many of the same plot points, and for the first few chapters it will feel like an outright retelling of the series, albeit working on an older version of the story. However, you will pretty fast discover that this is not one-to-one with the Evangelion you know. About halfway into the manga's equivalent of the first episode, we get to the part where Shinji refuses to get into the Eva, with the team wheeling out a heavily injured Rei, and a light fixture falls from the roof. However, it doesn't fall above Shinji, with the Eva throwing its hand out to save him - no, it's falling onto poor Rei, and Shinji throws himself to get her out of the way without the second thought!

The manga pretty quickly establishes this Shinji Ikari isn't the same as the one from the anime through changes like these - sure, his confidence is still at an all-time low, and he's still deeply depressed, but this Shinji has significantly more self-agency, he's more openly emotive, he's more ready to act for the people he cares about. Throughout the series, we're presented with a Shinji who's more willing to open his heart to others and let down his ego. It's a nice change of pace after going through the entire series with a clamped up Shinji and opens the series to different emotional plotlines that the anime could never have explored. It's not necessarily better, but it's not worse either - it's different, and it's the manga's biggest strength. You're not experiencing Evangelion in a different format, you're experiencing a different Evangelion.

The story has a lot of fun altering how its characters react and interact with each other. Asuka is a lot less aggressive yet more independent, Misato is a lot more motherly, Shinji's other classmates get different arcs entirely (mostly) by just changing how they percieve others. The biggest beneficiary of this is Rei, who in the anime more or less completes her character arc in Rei II when Shinji encourages her to smile. In the manga, she's given a lot more character and a lot more things to do - she has significantly more dialogue than she does in the show and has ongoing plot threads through to the end of the series that aren't just the fact she's a clone. It's one of the things I'd say the manga does outright better than the anime.

It's hard to talk about this manga without talking about its production. The sole person to work on it, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, is also the guy responsible for a majority of the main series' designs, from the main characters to the iconic Evangelions themselves; he's probably the guy who understands it the most aside from series creator Hideki Anno. The series was also conceived as a way to promote the show, but due to production issues with the show, released an entire year prior - it then was updated periodically over the next two decades, with the final chapter releasing well after the third Rebuild film. Those two factors, combined, make the fact this deviates very heavily from canon so interesting.

You can tell that once the series finished airing, Sadamoto felt the agency to make more significant changes to the story - all the significant plot changes are found in Volume 4 onwards, such as the manga's equivalent to the episode Asuka Attacks! being completely rewritten so none of the characters are on the ship to meet Asuka and instead meet her later, or how Kaworu is bumped up to main cast - oh yeah, Kaworu goes from being a one-episode character to being there for a FULL THIRD OF THE SERIES. His character (and his relationship with Shinji) is the most radically altered from his anime equivalent, in part to account for him appearing much earlier in the story but also in part to give him more things to do than invading NERV. It's hard to talk about these changes a lot more in-depth without spoiling them, but it's at the very least one of the most interesting changes made to the source material.

That's it for non-spoiler stuff. I do have a few criticisms - trust me, the praise isn't unanimous - but they're so spoiler-heavy and mostly late-game that you might as well just dive in. If you're interested in them, I've tagged it in a spoiler section at the bottom (alongside some other big spoiler thoughts) but trust me, just go in blind. All in all, it's not a particularly long series only clocking in at under 100 chapters, and if you even only somewhat enjoy Evangelion you should really give this one a read. It's in my opinion, incredible, and in some places improves an already pretty amazing anime (and if you're checking this out you probably already agree with that sentiment!).

Slightly more nuanced but spoiler-heavy section:

Spoiler, click to view

First off, one of my favourite changes to the series is how it approaches Toji and the Fourth Eva/Angel. This change is pretty evil, but it elicited such an emotional reaction from me that I can't get upset about it. Shinji is informed beforehand that Toji is the Fourth Child, and upon having control stolen away from him, Toji is killed. It's a pretty shocking change, and one that leads to a return to the more cowardly Shinji we're familiar with from the anime. His trauma is compounded tenfold, and he's too afraid to show his face to his friends. At first, I thought this was an excuse to write out Hikari and Kensuke, since this erases what little plot they had from the series besides leaving Tokyo-3, but then we return to them a few chapters later. And Hikari hates Shinji. She says it herself - they can never be friends again. Kensuke says something similar over the phone on his leave from the city. It's heartbreaking, and the fact there are such deep consequences for Shinji's cowardice is awful in such a good way - it eventually plays into Shinji's plot in the End of Eva section of the books, which is extra satisfying. This was one of the main changes that really solidified the manga as amazing in its own right for me.

Spoiler, click to view

There are a couple things preventing me from calling this the definitive version of the series. For example, Gendo's characterisation is worse, which is a shame. His motivations and actions are much more one-dimensionally villainous - it does make his comeuppance a lot more satisfying, but we lose out on the conflicted Gendo who apologises to Shinji in his last moments before being ripped to shreds by EVA-01. He also, comically, can generate an AT shield when he places Adam in his hand. It's a bit silly. Asuka is also written out of the series for a bit, for the sake of putting Kaworu in her place - this does happen in the anime, but instead of a single episode, it's several volumes where she's essentially a comatose non-character. While this does let Kaworu shine, I wish they'd let Asuka do something during that downtime, or at least not kept her comatose for the entire thing.

Spoiler, click to view

My main complaints, however, are directed towards the end portion of the manga. For better or worse, the manga decided to accurately adapt End of Evangelion - which, if you've read the actual series, comes off as an incredibly bizarre choice as the changes to characters and plot are so heavily stacked at this point that the series is headed to a different conclusion. It makes it all the more bizarre when in the midst of this incredibly accurate EoE adaptation, Sadamoto decides to make the single biggest change to the film's story he could pick - Shinji saves Asuka from the mass-produced Evas! Not only does he do this, but he does this after his pep talk from Misato (who gets a significantly cooler death in this one I must say), and after deciding that fuck, he would like to save Asuka, he cares for people no matter how much it hurts. He also does this right after getting off the elevator, instead of moping by the Eva while Asuka gets obliterated, in perhaps his strongest show of self-agency. This Shinji has completed his emotional character arc without triggering Instrumentality. This change itself isn't negative - if anything, it's one of my favourite moments in the manga, because it shows how much manga Shinji has changed and grown compared to anime Shinji. No, it's what happens right after that's most confounding, because Shinji triggers Instrumentality anyways. I genuinely thought this adaption was going to do away with Instrumentality, and the story sure does fake you out by making you think that, playing with your understanding of the events of EoE. It's only done to maintain consistency with the series, and it feels like such a boring choice, as it's pretty quickly undone as Shinji has, again, already completed his emotional arc, and he already knows he prefers people not being a big soul soup. It does, at the very least, tie up Rei's story, which to be fair I'm not sure how they'd go about otherwise, but it's a befuddling change at the end of an otherwise incredibly written and at times superior version of Evangelion. I'm also not sure how I feel about the whole timeline reset thing in the final chapter, although I'm less hung up on that than I am the manga version of Instrumentality. I don't necessarily hate it. Spoiler thoughts over!