Trevor Writes

Kadokawa Shoten / Viz Media 25. Neon Genesis Evangelion (Kadokawa Shoten/Viz Media, 2010-2014, Volumes 12-14) Writer and Illustrator - Yoshiyuki Sadamoto Shortly after Hideaki Anno conceived the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime in 1993, he met with comics creator Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and together they collaborated on a manga adaptation that was set to premiere shortly before the anime to help boost interest in the television series. While the 26-episode series aired in entirety over just six months, the manga - which retold the same story, more or less - ran for nearly 20 years, not completing its run in Japan until 2013 (with Viz publishing the final volume in 2014). Being a mostly faithful adaptation of the greatest anime series of all time pretty much guarantees the manga to be solid as well, but what makes it so valuable to the Evangelion diehards is the little differences that set the manga's version apart. Sadamoto makes this story his own, consistently evoking different...

I have a relationship with Takashi Miike dating back nearly 10 years, when I first opened myself up to Audition and Ichi the Killer in my mid-teens (back then, those were virtually every person's first Miike films; by far his most well known in North America). The morbid teen in me was drawn to his reputation as a shock master, but just a couple films in I realized he was so much more. He played with form in ways nobody else was doing. He was (and well, still sorta is) a director-for-hire, so not an auteur by the strictest of definitions (which is sorta why I don't take the auteur theory very seriously or look at it in narrow minded view), yet his films are so undeniably coated in his own unique aesthetic, sensibilities, and he frequently chooses scripts and film projects that carry with them a thematic consistently across his filmography (Tom Mes' fantastic book Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike is thus far the definitive text on Takashi Miike and makes the best ar...