What the F is FLCL? If you've seen the 6-episode anime series, you still may not know or care, other than it's one incredibly weird, wild, and trippy series where a kid sprouts robots from his head and keeps getting run over by a girl on a Vespa. Yep, strange stuff indeed.
I picked up this manga volume believing that it would be the basis for the anime, but now I see that it's the other way around. And it's a bit of a relief, because I was perplexed to find that I loved the anime way more than this manga. As weird and convoluted as the anime got, it actually made sense after so many viewings. I could watch the series and identify how each piece fits; with the manga, not so much. It's like a massive remix of everything, and it just made it all confusing.
To be fair, it is a very easy thing to read. The pages breeze by, thanks to the simple, to-the-point writing. Artwork is stylishly crude and simple. It's far from detailed or elegant, but that's also the beauty of it; it's like a form of minimalist pop art, and I can't help but to stop and stare at the weird, blocky, featureless faces on each page, because they look cool as they are. However, the book misses a lot of the manic energy that made the anime so great, and the action scenes in the manga tend to be very blurred and confusing.
The story is where the book loses me completely, because as far as I can tell the story makes no sense at all. Having seen the anime a few good times, to the point where I can understand it on a deeper level, I can tell that the manga hits up a lot of the same major events. All the main characters are represented, and generally fulfill the same roles. The minor characters receive more attention. The problem I see is that there's no clear direction for the plot; it just wanders from one random scene to the other. The characters have no evident motivation, so there's no natural progression from one scene to the next. I think the worst thing is that all the elements I could draw connections with in the anime are flipped around so much that I can't figure them out in the book. In the end, I was just confused.
As mentioned above, the manga is drawn with a heck of a style. All the characters look really slick, and the world they inhabit is pretty well-rendered. Writing is okay, but it doesn't explain much at all of the plot or characters, and it seems very simplistic overall.
The FLCL comic has a lot of craziness, but unlike the anime, there's no real semblance of method to make the madness palatable. It could just be that I didn't "get it," and it might take more readings to fully appreciate. Right now though, I just like the pretty pictures, and still value the anime version for having a stronger narrative, more compelling characters, and a batty style.
3/5 (Entertainment: Pretty Good | Story: Poor | Manga: Pretty Good)
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