#neotopia

Neotopia by Rod Espinosa

I remember the pulp paperbacks from thrift stores with lined spines, the graphic novels that I had to hunt down on ebay and at conventions because their runs were too short, and the shows that only lasted a season or two but which I still revisit.

The creators of these things will in all likelihood never know what their work meant to me and may even think that their effort didn’t amount to anything, but that doesn’t take away what it did for me.

So in honor of Neotopia Day I have a very special thing for you all!

Remember the SD Gundam anime that aired on Toonami during the early 200s and then just dropped off without a real conclusion, only for the second half of the series to be released on a special DVD set about a decade later (I assume)? Well, while reception to SDG was...divided here in the west, Japan had a different view of it, and that soon led to a full-fledged manga-version of the series.

A series of about 20 chapters were made. This wasn’t a shot-for-shot remake of the anime, however. Instead, it was condensed revision of the series, generally the same concept- The Dark Axis is on the loose, 3 Gundams and an eager boy jump up to defend- but done in a drastically different way. Taking advantage of the art style, chapters were filled to the brim with sight gags, and battles were completed in a far more drastic style than you could accomplish on television. For example;

(Fun, huh?)

The downside was that this abbreviated storytelling meant that certain characters were given a far less amount of screen time and focus than they had in the anime, and story arcs were possibly rushed. For example, in the anime, Lacroa wasn’t restored until the end of the series, but in the manga, the kingdom was fixed right at the end of the Deathscythe arc. And Genkimaru, a prominent fixture of the second season, didn’t appear until the Gundamusai arrived at Ark.