1 That's the other reason I haven't bothered with the AMG TV series.  I've read the manga up through about volume 20, and it just isn't going anywhere.  I like Skuld, I like Urd, I like Megumi, sometimes I even like Keiichi and Bell, but there's no story I'm interested in.

2

It isn't a single story. Like a lot of series, it's a scenario. That's not the same.

There are quite a few of those, and I'm always disappointed when I run into one because the reviews never warn me of it. Tenjo Tenge is a scenario, not a story. So was Kamichu. And it's turning out that Shakugan no Shana is like that.

3

Full Metal Panic was another like that. If there's any discernable overall story arc, I'll be damned if I know what it is.

Occasionally I can forgive such things. Crest/Banner of the Stars is like that, too, but the difference is that the scenario is such a good one, and the characters so vividly portrayed, that it's still worth watching. And each of the individual story arcs within the scenario actually does advance character development. Jinto and Lafiel at the beginning of Banner 1 are recognizably different than they were at the beginning of Crest.

And there really is a long term story being told; two, actually. There's the growing love between Jinto and Lafiel, and there's Lafiel's career path towards eventually becoming Empress. We know what the result will be, that's never in doubt. Lafiel will become Empress, and she and Jinto will have "children of love" with each other. So in that series, getting there is all the fun.

But most scenario-series are disappointing, because there's no feeling of progress, no reward in the end for the audience. There's a letdown, in fact, because there's an early feeling of progress being made as the scenario is being set up, and then suddenly there isn't any at all. Everything in Kamichu felt like it came to a screeching halt after the third episode. Tenjo Tenge apparently stops advancing right after the first big fight, about where I stopped watching it.

What a lot of us like about anime is that it tells stories and finishes them. But it doesn't, always; there's an attraction for a mangaka, or an anime studio, in a series which doesn't end, because it means they can keep milking it indefinitely.

4 I suppose I should mention that there's also a third major story arc in Crest/Banner: the war. But that also leads to significant changes in continuity, things like the loss, and later reconquest, of the Martine system.

5

AMG is actually kind of interesting, in that the manga-ka would apparently like to wrap things up, but the publisher doesn't want to let him.  There are always persistent rumors that he's finally going to wind things up "in the next few books", but so far they haven't been borne out.  However, he's apparently started working on some other projects, so maybe if he develops another cash cow he'll be allowed to put an ending on the story.

Unfortunately, in the meantime it causes AMG to fall into one of the annoying traps, where the author decides to advance things, writes a story arc that does, and then promptly ignores all the development in the next arc, because they can't really let things advance.

6

As the poor sap who translated the first several thousand pages of the OMG manga, let me assure you the main reason it was the first book I quit after handing over production to Dark Horse was that I looked ahead and realized I literally had several volumes of Keiichi stasis and pointless racing sequences to hack though before Hild showed up to make things interesting for a while...and I simply lost heart.

I think Fujishima has done some great work on the series.  His art and storytelling have gone though several changes, and always ended up better.  There are some great stories. But at least 50% of the series is spent spinning wheels while he tries to come up with a new storyline that, y'know, actually matters.  Manga-ka ofter do this.  Most pros can come up with a meaningless bit of character-driven or action-filled fluff to fill 24 pages in just a few days, hand it off to the assistants, then spend the rest of their time before deadline working on building the next "real" story.

OMG desperately needs to end.  Fujishima needs to "man up" and write the final story arc soon.  Then, if I had my druthers, a re-edited version with all the filler excised should be released.  Many, many manga need such a version published.  (It will never, ever happen, but a fella can dream.)

The problem of manga (and more rarely, anime) going on far beyond the limits of the story is so common it barely needs explication, but the forces on even a famous and powerful artist in Japan are such that it's almost impossible to escape the trap.  Hell, if they can do it to billionaires like Takahashi and Toriyama, no one is safe.  Staggering sums are at stake.  Jump lost something like 1/3 of its sales when Dragonball ended--a loss to the publisher in wholesale income of over half a billion dollars per year in magazine sales alone...plus double in profit that for collection sales.  My wife was working for Mediaworks during the Great Azumanga Daioh years and the panic of the company in squeezing the max out of a series which was--unusually--not practical to sustain bordered on insanity. 

The only reason Takahashi ended Maison Ikkoku the way she did was she cautiously broached the idea to her editor of wrapping it up in the next few volumes, and he blew a gasket, telling her in no uncertain terms she was not to do so.  She was so peeved she instead finished it as quickly as she could, which explains the otherwise inexplicably breathless race to the finish every fan of the series is all too familiar with.  Akira, as originally and carefully plotted, was supposed to run three volumes.  "Success pressure" stretched it to six, and the ending was a notable train wreck (he ended up adding some 100+ pages to the collection in a semi-failed attempt to rescue it).  Any professional editor can spot the filler, and while we joke about it, it's really not all that funny.  More manga are taken from brilliant to mediocre via this cause than all other issues combined.   This is why less popular manga can sometimes be far superior in story quality to more famous manga--which indeed, become little more than products.

Many initially great manga have disappointing endings because in the struggle to extend the story, it degrades so badly that sales fall to the point the publisher doesn't care so much, and the manga-ka is then allowed to wrap it up.  By that time the damage is done, however, and it can be incredibly sad.

You know, one of the problems with getting involved in manga on a professional level for 20 years is that reality sets in.  I am depressingly aware of the "man behind the curtain" and, in a way, it makes it very hard to read manga in a "pure" manner ever again.  It's a sacrifice the fans are blissfully unaware every manga pro in the USA makes to bring them their stack of books.  I'm sure people like Avatar suffer in the same way.

(Sorry for the rambling and lengthy post, Steven.)

7 Toren, I can't speak for Steven, but I found it a very worthwhile read.  You and Avatar are very good at pulling the curtains back just a bit and letting us normal fans see inner workings. 

8

I've heard that Toriyama intended the DB series to end after Goku defeated Frieza, but they simply wouldn't let him stop.

And in fact the Cell story arc is my favorite. On the other hand, the Majin Buu story arc really does feel like Toriyama was weary and was just marking time.

And even after that, they wouldn't let it end. DBGT is a continuation, and Toriyama didn't write it. By all reports, it's not as good. I haven't seen it, and I'm only mildly curious about it. (Now that Funimation has started releasing it in thinpaks, I might pick parts of it up, however.)

9

Among lesser known manga, you occasionally run into one that seems absurdly short. As you all know, Someday's Dreamers is among my favorite shows. Eventually TokyoPop released the original manga here in English -- and it turns out that even though the show was only 12 episodes, the director had to invent about half of the story he told. The manga is only like 11 chapters, and a couple of those couldn't be used in the series, though they would have made a good "special" later. (They take place in Yume's home town after Yume returns from Tokyo.)

I really do think there was a lot more juice in that story than the mangaka actually squeezed out of it; I think it could have been longer without suffering any quality problems. But maybe the mangaka wanted to do something else.

10

As the poor sap who translated the first several thousand pages of the OMG manga

That was you? I should have remembered that, since you're one of the few names I recognise on the American end of anime & manga publishing, dating back to your work on the Dirty Pair comics with Adam Warren. (That was my gateway drug to anime, by the way. Not sure if I should be thanking you or not. )

11 I get a touch of that sort of thing, certainly - it's always bad when you're watching a show like CCS or Trigun and you hear that audio glitch and your head comes around before you realize that nobody's paying you to spot them these days. ;p

At the same time, I've always been way out on the production limb, so I don't have the same kind of insider's view of the business (not to mention not having anywhere near the kind of history that Toren has, heh heh.) So it's always been a bit more Dilbert here than anything.

But in some ways that's absolutely correct. I doubt, for example, that I'll ever watch Eva again - I've had that damned show under the microscope for so long, the warts stand out too much for me to enjoy it. Even something like RahXephon loses some of its luster when you know what the writers were thinking.

Then again, I just finished timing Nanoha S1 last night; it doesn't take an insider to figure out that a significant part of the intended audience for the show are people we'd think of as pedophiles. I guess the ability to put that sort of thing in a pigeonhole and still enjoy the series is what's allowed me to keep at it over the years; I've liked almost everything I ever worked on, more or less, even if I can look back at it and figure out that my like for things like Wedding Peach or FFU were almost entirely developed in self-defense, like a kind of callus. ;p

I eventually stopped reading AMG, 18 volumes in or so. I actually enjoyed a good bit of the pointless racing, but yeah, even after Keiichi mostly gets his life together, after a while the story's purely spinning its wheels, and after working on some truly weird stuff, Fujishima just can't trip the breaker anymore.

12 Tenjo Tenge definitely continues the story after the big fight. The flashback afterwards begins to show why things are the way they are, with Maya and Aya's brother Shin, who is revealed to have been overwhelmed by his own power and secretly been killing innocent people. Later flashbacks reveal these events led to Mitsuomi going from a kind person to a tyrant to keep other power users under control. When the Juken Club returns to school, there are consequences. Maya warns Bob and Nagi that more skilled fighters will be after them because of their increased reputations. This is proven true when someone attacks them with a real metal sword. Because of all the injured school members from the bowling alley fight, Maya gets expelled. Later, Maya and Mitsuomi team up to find Aya when it's feared that she's losing control of her power too.

The mangaka of Someday Dreamers did a series set in the same world but with different characters. Tokyopop translated it as Someday Dreamers: Spellbound, with five volumes so far.

I've noticed a minor bug where mail and web information is erased after previewing a post.