Is FLCL Worth Reading? (Manga)

Overview

Naota's life in the small town of Mabase was already defined by boredom and a jaded kind of cynicism after his baseball-playing older brother left for the United States. That boredom ends abruptly when Haruko, a strange young woman riding a Vespa, hits him with a bass guitar, and things get stranger from there, including robots that start growing directly out of his head. FLCL's manga adaptation runs with the same wild premise as the original OVA, filtered through Hajime Ueda's distinctive, rough-edged art and told in its own, more scattered way.

It's less a straightforward retelling of the anime than a loosely connected companion piece with its own sense of chaos.

What it does well

Ueda's art is the clearest reason to pick this up. His rough, sketchy style is genuinely unlike anything else on shelves, and it does real work conveying Naota's confusion and the series' overall sense of barely-contained chaos. The characters are varied and given real attention, Naota's weary, curious perspective anchors the story, and his oddball family and the supporting cast around him earn some of the manga's best moments. The adaptation also keeps a lot of the original show's charm intact, including its scattered nods to other anime, and individual pages stand out as genuinely memorable even when the broader plot doesn't fully cohere.

Where it falls short

The plot is where the manga struggles most. It jumps across time and place in ways that make it legitimately difficult to follow, and an unconventional chapter numbering scheme only adds to the disorientation. The ending in particular lands as abrupt and disjointed rather than offering any real sense of closure. Compared to the original six-episode OVA, which had, as one reviewer put it, "method in the madness," the manga trades that tight construction for something looser and harder to parse, and the art itself, distinctive as it is, can be genuinely difficult to follow in places.

Verdict

FLCL's manga is worth a look for the art alone, and for fans of the anime curious about a different take on its ideas. As a standalone story, though, its fragmented plotting and abrupt ending make it a tougher sell than the show that inspired it.