Who Answers The Answerman?

hey answerman, here's an old question for you: what do you think of Evangelion? Is it a masterpiece or trash?

Evangelion is a pretty good show. I rewatch it once every few years and it's still entertaining and fairly gripping even now. I really liked the film, The End of Evangelion, as well. Hell, I liked both endings, to be honest. Even that silly slapped-together TV ending with the folding chairs and recycled footage.

Honestly, these days, the "debate" over whether or not Evangelion is worth anything seems to have eclipsed any kind of real "fandom" the show may have had, at least in America. I find the only people who still seem to be really vocal about the series are the ones who apparently find it their sworn solemn duty to make sure everyone on the planet knows Evangelion sucked and all the symbolism and iconography in it is pointless hollow wankery. Maybe it's just the communities I dwell in, but the "frothing rabid EVA fanboy who defends it against all criticisms" who was out in force when the show was originally coming out on VHS is basically an extinct stereotype. Maybe there are one or two left out there but the haters appear to far outnumber the fans when it comes to being vocal about the show.

For my part, I've always felt that even if the symbolism and iconography in the show was pretentious empty posturing on Anno's part, I still dug it. It gave me something to chew on, and I liked all the psychological horror stuff, too; it felt like the show meant something more than your average robot show at the time (a genre the series basically reinvented), even if so many people now claim that it means nothing whatsoever. Having something to think about and dig into, even if at the end of your digging you come to an empty room... well, at least there was something to dig through. Not many shows can claim to have that. Deep subtext and meaning are often rare things in the world of television anime.

I do stand by my conceit that Raxephon improved on what Evangelion started and remains, all things considered, the best example of the "psychological robot show".

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Hey Answerman, I was reading Anime Insider's letters section the other day and in it, the guy writing it said that Gundam has never been all that popular in America. I was wondering why that is, if it is true.

Well, of course it's true. Rob Bricken would never lie to you.

Gundam's seemingly baffling lack of popularity in America has puzzled industry vets and fans for some time now. In spite of the many, many releases, after Gundam Wing faded, the franchise really lost whatever steam it had. Gundam SEED never caught on - the ratings on Cartoon Network were abysmal and it quickly got scuttled to the 3:30AM "death slot" usually reserved for other ratings stinkers like .hack:// Legend of the Twilight Bracelet. Bandai keeps releasing the DVDs, so I have to assume someone is buying them, but the DVDs haven't ever been hot sellers.

Simply put, the franchise never caught on here. It's the "Star Trek" of Japan, and so when Bandai started to push it here in the States and backed it up with a lot of DVD releases, TV runs and marketing dollars, everyone expected it to take off. But it never really did. Instead, the only people who seemed to care much for it were the hardcore superfans, the people who loved it before it ever saw the light of day in America.

One thing that's important to understand is that Gundam is such a phenominal success in Japan mostly due to nostalgia for the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which was essentially the biggest thing since sliced bread there in 1979. That series, which pioneered an entire genre and laid the groundwork for decades of nostalgia-fueled sequels, spinoffs, toys and games, didn't debut here in the States until 2001, to an audience of anime fans and kids who were used to anime that looked like Cowboy Bebop rather than something their parents would've watched when they were kids. It never really stood a chance; Bandai waited 20 years to show Americans why the Japanese were so nutty for Gundam, and by then the response was a shrug, followed by a swift change of the channel.

That's not to say the Gundam franchise is a total failure in the US - the toys sell pretty well to my knowledge and the video games, in spite of almost always getting drubbed critically, keep coming out so I assume the investment continues to be worth something to Bandai. But the anime has floundered, it's true.

Additionally, I think a small part of it has to do with the daunting amount of material that's out there. It's difficult to be a "casual" Gundam fan - either you're into it or you're not, and the whole franchise is so vast that hardcore fans are more likely to self-identify as "Gundam Fans" rather than "Anime Fans".

From "Rendakor":

From Sarah Wolinsky:

The worst manga I've ever read actually started out very well. Tomoko Hayakawa's 'Perfect Girl Evolution' ('The Wallflower' in the Del Rey localizations) was really funny and very well-drawn at first- a charming story about four sexy guys moving into a mansion for three years for free with the condition that they turn the landlady's horror-movie-watching, all-black-wearing, socially deprived niece Sunako into a 'lady' within that time period.

And while this plays out cute and sometimes hilarious at first, it degrades extremely quickly. The characters go from pallets waiting to be painted to paper-thin stock garbage. There's the crazy goth girl (Sunako), the angry hot guy (Kyohei), the smart hot guy (Takenaga), the philandering hot guy (Ranmaru), and the cute hot guy (Yuki). Oh, and the smart hot guy's sexy-but-brainless girlfriend (Noi) and the uncaring landlady. And that's it. There are no other characters in the story- if they appear in one chapter, they're sure to be gone before the volume is finished if not by the end of the chapter.

Backgrounds have all but disappeared by the second volume. The art style is iffy at first but becomes completely laughable, in which the only characters with any kind of cohesion in their look are the five main ones (two of which interchange hairstyles, which the artist herself confessed, making the stories somewhat confusing). Sunako goes from a five-foot-something human being to a one-foot mess of random pencil strokes. Her nose is two points, her mouth one stroke, her eyes are not included, and the whole effect is one of a second-grader learning to make ball-and-stick people. One needs to see it for themselves- it's absolutely terrible, perhaps even embarrassing, that someone could succeed with such slipshod artwork.

Finally, the plot all but falls on itself. Rather than offer a concrete story about a woman coming to terms with her own past, apparently Hayakawa can't get beyond her love of mindless fanservice to write anything more than her four sexy men doing something sexy. Gothic photo shoot? Check. Cross-dressing? Check. Bathing in a hot springs? Check, and this is just in the first three volumes. Unlike other fanservice manga, Perfect Girl Evolution tries much too hard. It can barely disguise its complete lack of tact and direction. This compounds on the one-dimensional characters, where pathetic attempts at humour amount to Kyohei breaking things, Takenaga reading things, Ranmaru accidentally making dates with three girls at the same time and Yuki making cute faces.

I could at least appreciate the effort put into Perfect Girl Evolution a little bit more if Hayakawa was, say, a busy mother of three who works in an office. Naturally, she's got a whole team behind her (yet she's still the one drawing the main characters, including the unbelievably crappy Sunako). From her incoherent ramblings in the notes, I kind of get the idea that her heart's not in it- she's a huge fan of J-Rock, and loves to talk about how she's always late for deadlines because she just had to go to this concert and see this artist and leave this many articles of clothing behind. (Of course, her four sexy men are all based on her four favourite J-Rock artists- who would have guessed?)

It's a shame that such a good idea was wasted on an artist whose work amounts to whatever she could scribble down fifteen minutes before a deadline. Definitely something to avoid if you value your aesthetic sense.

Finally, from Marcelo Gomes:

The worst manga I've ever read was Medabots. I don't hate the Medabots franchise. In fact, I used to have a good time while watching the anime because it was really funny, but the manga is simply unreadable. The whole story doesn't make any sense because the characters have no real objective: in the first 2 pages of a chapter they say something, which is completely irrelevant to page 3. Than in page 4 we see a completely out-of-the-blue battle that stands for the rest of the chapter - and that's about it. If there is an attempt of comedy in the manga (which I don't remember seeing), it fails because this manga is the boredom in form of paper.

The art doesn't help one little bit: honestly, even I could do better! The manga has almost no background artistry (and, when it does, it's pathethic) and the characters all seem to have the same age (even though some characters are not children). The battles are barely comprehensible thanks to the lack of details. But the worst part is that almost all the human characters are drawn in one single position (front), in all (yes, all) pages. Reading one volume was simply one of the worst experiences of my life (except maybe watching Musashi Gun-Doh).

Here's our topic for this week: