Bastard!! (Crime & Punishment): I See a Red Door & I Want it Painted Black... No Colors Anymore, I Want Them to Turn Black

Previously on the Bastard!! review:
"In the end, Hell's Requiem is a transitional arc, one that allowed Kazushi Hagiwara to move Bastard!! from a simple D&D-inspired fantasy story to something with more meat to it... One with greater stakes & more apocalyptic consequences."

After finishing Hell's Requiem in the 1992 Winter Special, Bastard!! soldiered on, with the next story arc debuting in the following Spring Special. Unfortunately, Kazushi Hagiwara's infamous penchant for being a perfectionist artist, alongside his obsession for constantly making his own Wonderful Megadeath doujinshi & simultaneously co-creating the Combustible Campus Gaurdress OVA with Satoru Akahori, resulted in Bastard!! missing the 1993 Spring Special; he also did artwork for the Bastard!! side-story novels, so he was extra busy at this point. However, unlike missing an issue of Weekly Shonen Jump, this meant that readers now had to wait six months in total for the next chapter! This wasn't a one-off, though, as he also missed the 1994 Winter & Autumn Specials and the 1995 Autumn Special. Hagiwara was also no longer being consistent with page counts either, as they now wildly varied from 30+ to 90+ pages. The result of this is that the next six volumes-worth of content took until the 1996 Summer Special, a little over four years, to come out. In fact, said Summer Special marked the end of the seasonal specials as a whole, as Shueisha would replace them with Akamaru Jump at the end of the year, which featured only one-shots again. Coincidentally, Viz's English release of Bastard!! suffered a change in scheduling of its own during this specific portion of the manga, as after Volume 14 in January of 2007 the series slowed down to a crawl of only two volumes every year, mainly due to low sales. I guess, if anything, we got an experience similar to what Japanese readers had to go through with this series at that point.

While all of this was going on, though, Bastard!! itself was going into a new direction. As I mentioned at the start of The Dark Rebel Armies' review, one of Hagiwara's major influences for wanting to become a mangaka was Go Nagai's Devilman, and that manga is notable for its wild tonal shift in the final third. While Nagai's series already had a darker tone with its whole "fusing with a literal demon to protect humanity" concept, it wasn't until the last stretch of the manga, in which the demons finally just initiated full-on war with humanity, that it truly became legendary. At this point nothing was sacred... And literally no one in the series was safe from brutal, violent, & horrific death. To more general anime fandom, people are familiar with Kentaro Miura's Berserk, which obviously took some inspiration from Devilman with the end of its Golden Age Arc, better known to all as "The Eclipse". In it, main character Guts & his Band of the Hawk brethren are offered as literal sacrifices to a seemingly unending horde of demons, which had only previously appeared in very small numbers, & no one was safe. I bring this up mainly because Berserk wouldn't get to The Eclipse until around 1996... Which would be around the time Bastard!! was coming to the "end" of Crime & Punishment, the story arc which can erroneously be interpreted as "Bastard!!'s equivalent to The Eclipse".

[NOTE: At this point, MAJOR SPOILERS are going to be a given, & for more than just Bastard!!, so continue on at your own risk! Also, this is a LOOOOOONG review, so abandon all free time, ye who continue reading.]

Twelve Older Anime That Deserve License Rescues X: Ten Years Gone Part 2

If I really wanted to, I could have started these license rescue lists with some of the most obvious & blatant picks that I could find at the time, and just about anytime it seemed right I could have easily included something that would have seemed like a blatant shoo-in to get rescued. For example, after Bandai Entertainment was shuttered in 2012, I could have easily included Cowboy Bebop in the 2013 list. I precisely chose not to, though, because I have always wanted the license rescue list to prioritize the less likely or forgotten, with only the occasional more obvious pick; however, Bebop would still have felt too obvious, so it was never considered in any way. However, there has been one anime that, while not in contention early on, would occasionally be considered by me for inclusion in later lists, but I continually held off, using the justification of, "Well, it's going to happen any moment now... Right?", and yet here we are on the 10th license rescue list, & I feel as though I have no choice but to finally add it to the pile.

I mean, seriously, why HASN'T Berserk been license rescued yet?!

When I made the first list at the start of 2011, Berserk had last been re-released just about two years prior, with Media Blasters' digitally remastered DVD boxset release from December 2008 (or March 2009, according to other sites), so at that point the anime was in no way a viable contender for the license rescue lists. However, it's been over a decade since that release & it has yet to be re-released in any fashion in North America, even after both the movie trilogy that retold that anime saw release by Viz Media & the newer anime continuation having been simulcasted (& insulted for its poor use of CG) by Crunchyroll & given a home video release (with improved, if not outright redone, animation) by FUNimation. But let me not get too far ahead of myself, and instead start back at the beginning. Kentaro Miura debuted the manga Berserk in 1989 in the pages of Hakusensha's Young Animal magazine (originally Monthly Animal House, until 1992), and it became a big hit, especially once Miura entered the Golden Age Arc, which told of main character Guts' time as a member of hired mercenary group the Band of the Hawk. In late 1997, NTV aired a 25-episode late-night TV anime adaptation of the Golden Age Arc titled Kenpu Denki/Sword-Style Romance Berserk (because the anime just had to have that "Adjective-Noun" preamble, I guess), covering all the way through the infamous finale featuring "The Eclipse", which had just happened in the manga only about a year prior, at most; talk about striking while the iron was hot.

Twelve Older Anime That Deserve License Rescues X: Ten Years Gone Part 1

"It's never good to forget the past; looking back while moving forward can never hurt, it can only remind." - Me, January 10, 2011

Back in the second month of this blog's existence, I decided to gather together twelve(-ish) anime that I felt "deserved" getting a new lease on life in North America, i.e. anime I felt were in need of a "license rescue". Ever since then I've done one of these lists almost every single year (2011 had two, while I skipped 2018 in favor of a "streaming purgatory" list), which will make this the 10th license rescue list for the 10th year of the blog. Over the course of the previous nine lists, I've brought up 124 different anime (I got a wee bit overzealous in some lists, but have since toned it back down), and of those 43 have actually been "rescued" & re-released (56% of which by Discotek Media, #NotSponsored). In fact, I must have been precognitive or something with that first list, because it's been the most "successful" of them all by a wide margin, with only three left untouched: Haja Taisei Dangaioh, the Bastard!! OVA, & I'm Gonna Be An Angel!. Seriously, while I understand Bastard!!'s potential licensing hurdle (Shueisha), why hasn't Dangaioh been rescued yet?! So, after a decade of gathering together previously-licensed & released anime that have since been buried by the sands of time, is there truly anything else worth bringing up?

Actually, there are! I've purposefully held off on including some anime mainly because I felt that they were guaranteed shoe-ins for rescuing, but have yet to still happen, even after all this time... So I guess it's time to finally start including some of those! But first, something a little bit different.

In last year's list I bent the rules by including Team Astro, the 2005 live-action adaptation of the 70s Shonen Jump baseball manga that disregarded all the rules (including those of physics themselves) & wound up establishing some of the basic groundwork for modern shonen action manga. As for why I included a non-anime production in a list about anime, it's mainly because Team Astro was so over-the-top & filled with tokusatsu special effects (talk about a redundancy...) that it was effectively a live-action anime, in many ways. Therefore, I might as well get another "live-action anime" adaptation out of the way with Aoi Honou, better known online as Blue Blazes! Kazuhiko Shimamoto is an absolute & devoted follower of old-school, hot-blooded manga storytelling, with his most iconic work being Blazing Transfer Student, a lovingly simultaneous parody & homage of hot-blooded action manga. Shimamoto has also had fun reinterpreting his own career as a mangaka through his Pen Series, consisting of the Burning Pen, Shouting Pen, & New Shouting Pen, totaling 25 volumes(!). A fictionalized account, these manga star Moyuru Honoo (literally "Burning Blaze") & cover his life in the manga industry, but in 2007 Shimamoto changed things up a bit.

Bastard!! (Hell's Requiem): Back in the Back of a Cadillac... #1 with a Bullet, I'm a Power Pack!

Previously on the Bastard!! review:
"Going off of the fact that The Dark Rebel Armies storyline does have something that could be treated as an "ending", even if there are still some loose ends left unaddressed, it's likely Hagiwara took a precaution, just in case his editor told him that the manga would end after this story finished up. However, Hagiwara was allowed to continue making Bastard!!... and it'd be treated as its own sort of special attraction."

After Issue #33 in 1989, which marked the end of The Dark Rebel Armies story arc, Kazushi Hagiwara's Bastard!! ran for three more chapters, introducing a new story arc, before it stopped appearing in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump; it lasted 72 chapters (73, if you count the Wizard!! one-shot). Normally, this would be your standard story of a manga getting cancelled right as it started hinting at the next part of the story, something that happens all the time in one of the most cutthroat manga magazines in the business. In fact, Bastard!! had generally maintained a lower "ranking" in Jump's Table of Contents during its entire run, and while that's not an end-all-be-all determinator of success, it does reflect a general idea of what readers are more interested in, & therefore what the editors want to promote more, compared to everything else currently running; everyone wanted to read Dragon Ball, so that was constantly near the top of the "ToC". Still, there was just something in the manga that Kazushi Hagiwara was making, & it was certainly getting attention (& likely was selling well enough), so it's not like the series could be simply dropped & forgotten about. Also, while Hagiwara himself was a talented artist, he was also a notorious perfectionist who had a habit of running himself ragged trying to constantly produce a serialized manga on a weekly basis, resulting in things like "extra panels" or blatantly unfinished spots, all of which Hagiwara would poke fun at; this would also often be the subject of the 4-koma gags Hagiwara included in every volume.

The solution was to give Bastard!! a magazine of its own to call home... Sort of.

In mid-1968, Shueisha debuted Shonen Jump, which was originally released biweekly until October of 1969, when it was renamed "Weekly Shonen Jump". The same year the magazine moved to a weekly schedule, a special issue of Jump was published during a gap that occurred, & once the main magazine became weekly this special issue became a quarterly publication, simply titled "Shonen Jump"; I'm absolutely, positively, definitively sure that totally didn't confuse people... maybe. In Spring 1985, these special issues were slightly renamed, as they were now being published alongside Japanese holidays every season, becoming the "Shonen Jump Winter/Spring/Summer/Autumn Special"; that specific order is how they came out in a calendar year. These seasonal specials were where newcomer mangaka had an opportunity to showcase their burgeoning skills via one-shots, and is in fact where two of Hagiwara's original three one-shots, Summer 1987's Binetsu Rouge & Winter 1988's Virgin Tyrant, were published; established mangaka also had the chance to test new ideas out here via one-shots. However, that's pretty much all these seasonal specials were good for, so I'd imagine that Shueisha wanted to try to spice things up (like sales) by including a regular serialization alongside the one-shots, & Hagiwara's series was the perfect choice; also, the longer time between chapters might help with his perfectionism (spoiler: it did not). So, starting with the 1990 Winter Special, Bastard!! entered quarterly serialization, becoming the only serialized manga to ever run in the seasonal specials; while Bastard!! wasn't the cover for every issue, Dark Schneider's face tended to always sneak in somewhere. This leads us to the second of Bastard!!'s story arcs: Hell's Requiem.