A two-volume manga of FLCL was created by artist Hajime Ueda. The manga interprets the season with all of the key elements intact, and tells the events of the anime using a reductive art style and unsteady pacing. Jack Kotin defended the unique art style of the manga, saying, "It can be crudely drawn at times, but this style fits in well with the overall story and atmosphere...".
wiki:https://flcl.fandom.com/wiki/FLCL_(manga)
Posted on 23 September 2021, 15:30 by: candy mathers
Score +47
I love FLCL, but this manga is wack. Haruko smokes now (which undermines the symbolism of why Mamimi is the one who smokes) and is really just a villain instead of being the more complex, morally ambiguous character she was before and Naota is an unrepentant killer who actually commits fratricide instead of his dad being a robot and the killing being an accident, plus his grandpa blows himself up to take down MM, so Naota's an orphan by the end of the manga. It's just an edgier, more incoherent version of the original. It was never going to be the same since FLCL was an experiment in new animation techniques in addition to being a coming-of-age story and the soundtrack and use of color brought every scene to life. I still have my copies of the manga, but that's only because I'm a huge FLCL fan and a collector, same goes for the rather dry novelization and my blu-ray copies of the catastrophically bad FLCL: Progressive and the less-bad-but-still-not-amazing FLCL: Alternative. Bottom line: the original is the best.
I could be wrong, but I remember reading something that the original plan in the anime also involved Naota killing his father (but somehow his father would come back in the next episode) but there was an actual case in Japan that involved a boy killing one of his parents (or it might have been his grandfather) so they changed it. This was in the development period though so it didn't affect the story in the end, and they later said they were glad they changed it.
Hajime Ueda is a bit of an odd artist though. If you've read some of her other work it becomes a bit easier to understand why she included the baseball killing. She likes random violence like that.