FLCL

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"Nothing cool ever happens here."

This line of dialogue is the single largest lie in media history, regardless of medium. However much you may or may not have heard of FLCL, you probably have at least heard one thing; the story of this series is very....eccentric. It brings strange and interesting characters together to go through some of the most ridiculous events imaginable. One of the main characters fights robots with a ukulele for God's sake! Anyway, this review is specifically about the manga obviously so lets talk about that.

Art:
Honestly FLCL has some of the best and art of any manga series I have ... read to date. Not necessarily because it is so visually pleasing to me, but just because it is so appropriate for the story itself. As mentioned earlier, the story for FLCL is very unique and eccentric and the art matches it so well with its goofy and cartoony look. However there are times that panels can be rather hard to interpret and may irritate you. However these panels are far and few between as well as usually being just small action sequence panels.

Characters:
The characters of FLCL are all fun and interesting and each are noteworthy in their own way whether you are talking about the eccentric and violent Haruko or the impatient and short-tempered Takkun. Without the colorful cast, FLCL would not be nearly as fun as it is and would not be as memorable.

Story:
The story of FLCL, for me, is where the series is weakest. Not to say that it is bad by any means, rather quite the opposite, nonetheless it is its weakest point. The manga especially may confuse its readers at times with its plot. Even though I have always been a very comprehensive reader, it did take me two readings to fully understand what was going on. Because of this I would recommend watching the anime first rather than reading the manga like myself, as it is easy to get lost at times in the manga, where the anime seems to do a better job of explaining the situations the story puts you in. Though you should also keep in mind that the two stories in the FLCL anime and the FLCL manga are NOT the same. There are many tie-ins, but they are unique stories.

Overall:
I greatly enjoyed the manga (especially on my second read through after completing the anime), and would recommend it to anyone wishing to experience a similar, but significantly different version of the FLCL they know.

Surprisingly, I actually like the anime better then the manga. The manga tries a bit too hard to be serious and in some areas, it does it well but in others it feels like it’s a little forced. The anime made things a lot more fun and comical even if it was pretty random. The manga on the other hand, the idea of these characters being so serious when the world around them is going crazy just feels like they are becoming rather bland characters.

The manga though does make Naoto out to be more of a boy his own age who just has had ... a bad run in his life with people he kind of doesn’t really care much about. His father and grandfather are crazy, his father always getting into other peoples business and his grandfather wanting him to become a good baseball player. His mother is no where to be found although I could never tell if she just died or ran off somewhere. He has a teacher who tries to protect her students from the world and acts as though they are much more innocent then they are. Even a lot of the friends he has seem to outcast him or tease him. The only person he really seems to care about is his brother’s ex- girlfriend and yet she always seems to see him as his brother. I would understand why a boy like that would be in depression if the world around him was like that.

You could almost look at his world as the same with a video game called Mother (Earth Bound to some). In Mother, a young boy ends up with a strange power and goes on a quest to learn about the outside world, only to stop an evil alien that wants to destroy the world. In FLCL, Naoto is a normal boy who has strange things coming out of his head and ends up having to deal with aliens all while learning about growing up. I can’t say its exact, hell I could never say it was exactly the same type of story but for those of you that know Mother, the idea is very similar.

When we get near the end, though both the manga and the anime have different endings to one another, I still liked each of them for what they were. They just had a very different effect to the story and seemed like it was trying to say something different then the other. The Anime was much easier to interrupt then the manga and I felt like I was getting lost a bit more then I should but still, for the two volumes it was, it was pretty interesting to see the difference.

The artwork is all over the place from rather thick lines to small thin lines that look rather like sketches. There is a lot of negative or white space around the characters and when there is a background, it looks very much like a dream with almost a hazy look. Many of the lines feel like they were actually done with ball point pen or a paint brush and only some of the pages have a rather soft or smooth look to it.

One of those rare instances where the anime adaptation is actually MUCH better than the manga. The manga is basically unreadable. It's incredibly hard to follow, and makes no sense. It erratically jumps around... It's just a very hard read, to say the least. I would go back and forth between the same few pages trying to figure out what was going on before eventually giving up. On a positive note, the art is pretty good. It's not ground-breaking by any means, but is rather nice.

Watch the anime first! The manga will make you not want to watch the anime, and you will be missing ... out.