An Introduction to Romance of the Three Kingdoms... in Anime Form

The Han dynasty was a powerful & influential era of Chinese history, and by 100 AD/CE had more or less ruled over the country with little to no truly dynasty-shattering moments since its formation in 202 BC... minus the Xin dynasty that usurped control from 9 to 23 AD/CE, at least. However, following the death of Emperor He in 105 the Han would slowly but steadily decline, as a string of Han emperors following He would all be too young to truly take command right away, resulting in older relatives becoming the de facto rulers, which in turn would result in the actual emperors making political alliances with senior officials & eunuchs to take back control from their greedy elders. This eventually led to the populace starting protests, culminating in what would be known as the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184, where Zhang Jiao, leader of the Taoist movement the Way of Supreme Peace, managed to accumulate a following of several hundreds of thousands & revolted against the Han. Current ruler Emperor Ling, in turn, decreed that local Chinese governments would supply soldiers to assist the Han generals in taking down the Yellow Turban Rebellion... and this decision would act as the spark to an eventual era of civil war, one where China itself would over time be split up into three powerful kingdoms, an era that wouldn't end until 280, when the Jin dynasty managed to take command of a re-unified China.

In the late 200s, some time after the Jin took control, writer & historian Chen Shou would collect the history of the prior era of civil war into what is now known as Records of the Three Kingdoms, part of what's now called the Twenty-Four Histories of China. Then, sometime in the 14th century, writer & playwright Luo Guanzhong (or, at least, he's the one attributed) took Chen Shou's Records & retold the story of the "Three Kingdoms" in a more dramatic & romanticized fashion, resulting in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the first of what would be considered the six "Great Classical Chinese Novels". Starting at the Yellow Turban Rebellion, Romance focuses primarily on the three warlords who would come to form the titular Three Kingdoms of China: Liu Bei of the Shu Han, Cao Cao of the Cao Wei, & Sun Quan of Eastern Wu. Each of these three warlords had (somewhat) legitimate claims as to why they should be the one to rule over all of China, as Liu Bei was seemingly a blood descendant of Emperor Jin (who ruled from 188-141 BC), & all Liu Bei wanted was to continue the legacy of the Han. Meanwhile, Cao Cao never truly staked a claim over rulership, as he made sure the current Han dynasty was still intact during his conquests & was technically acting on behalf of Emperor Xian, mainly for political reasons. It would be Cao Cao's son, Cao Pi, who actually ended the Han dynasty & established Wei as a kingdom, following his father's death. Finally, Sun Family patriarch Sun Jian had managed to come across the Imperial seal after it was hidden away, which would technically give him power to make official decrees, but through a series of circumstances the seal would eventually wind up with Cao Pi, who used it to legitimize Wei's stance as the "true" successor to the Han. Sun Quan, one of Sun Jian's sons, would initially agree to serve as a vassal of Wei, but eventually broke free after Cao Pi ordered that Quan send his son Sun Deng to the capital as a hostage. Essentially, Liu Bei had the royal lineage, Cao Cao had the Imperial capital (& the Emperor himself), & the Sun Family had the Imperial seal (for a time, at least).

Romance is notable for fictionalizing many aspects of the historical figures & events seen within, like having Liu Bei make an oath of brotherhood with Guan Yu & Zhang Fei in a peach garden (while the three were known to think of each other as brothers in actual history, the peach garden oath in generally agreed to be pure fiction), as well as softening some of the less honorable aspects of the various generals & warlords seen throughout, i.e. romanticization. Romance of the Three Kingdoms remains an all-time classic of an epic novel (around 800,000 words across 120 chapters), and its reach across the world is immeasurable... especially in Japan.

A Look at (Some of) ADV Manga's "One-&-Cancelled" Releases

For as much as there is natural crossover between fans of anime & fans of manga, especially since many of the former are adaptations of the latter, they are still very different businesses, at heart. This is especially true in the North American industries of both, and that's why the English anime & manga industries are made up (for the most part) of completely different companies. There have been some exceptions throughout history, though, of an anime licensing company entering the manga business, or vice versa. The most notable one is Viz, which is a manga publisher first & foremost but also releases the occasional anime, but we've also seen Central Park Media, Media Blasters, Bandai Entertainment, & TokyoPop try their hands at releasing both anime & manga; Kodansha USA's also dipped its toes with some Attack on Titan OADs that came bundled with four manga volumes. Probably one of the most infamous attempts at double-dipping, though, would have to be ADV Manga, which was formed in mid-2003 as the manga publishing side of A.D. Vision, Inc./ADV, which was best known for its anime licensing side, ADV Films. At launch ADV Manga naturally focused on titles related to anime that ADV Films had released, like Gunslinger Girl, Those Who Hunt Elves, Full Metal Panic!, Azumanga Daioh, Najica, Darkside Blues, & Steel Angel Kurumi, as well as some stuff outside of their wheelhouse, like Demon Palace Babylon, Demon City Hunter, & Seven of Seven.

Then, as was kind of standard for the 00s English anime/manga bubble era... ADV Manga went kind of crazy & overindulgent.

In January of 2004 it was announced that ADV Manga had licensed "over 1000 individual volumes of manga and manwha for North American release", roughly double (if not slightly more) than what TokyoPop had planned to release in 2004 alone, though not all of these books were planned for release in that year by ADV Manga. Then, later that March, ADV Manga sent out a press release announcing all of the various manga it had recently licensed... ALL 37 SERIES!!!!! Yeah, in just a single press release ADV Manga had gone from "supplemental manga division of a major anime company" to "licensing more manga/manhwa than it could possibly ever handle", and by November of that same year it was already confirming three titles that were initially announced in that March press release had been cancelled after just one or two volumes getting released. Cancellations would continue to happen as ADV Manga went into 2005, resulting in only a small amount of titles seeing continual release, and after mid-2007 ADV Manga was quietly killed off, with only a small handful of titles being rescued by TokyoPop previously in 2006 (Aria, Tactics, & Peacemaker Kurogane) or by Yen Press later in 2009 (Yotsuba&! and Azumanga Daioh). Sure, ADV Manga's death was likely partially due to ADV's own disastrous partnership with Sojitz necessitating some stemming of the bleeding being felt by that point, as this was mere months before ADV would enter its death spiral in early 2008, becoming the "Zombie ADV" shell corporation that it continues to exist as to this very day, due to it seemingly having perpetual international rights to Kino's Journey [2003], Chance Pop Session, Elfen Lied, & (maybe?) Samurai Gun, all of which it co-produced. However, there's no doubt that ADV Manga would have died anyway once the 00s English anime bubble burst in 2008/2009, and in its wake is a multitude of manga that never saw complete English release... some of which only ever saw a single volume.

A couple of years ago at an anime con I came across a vendor that happened have a bunch of these "one-&-cancelled" releases by ADV Manga. I decided to buy them so that I would, one day, read them & see if they were truly not worth releasing more of or if they were simply innocent victims of an overindulgent & overzealous (now former) giant of the American anime industry. While these aren't all of the "one-&-cancelled" releases by ADV Manga I did manage to get six of them (technically seven, but I'll explain that at the end), which looks to be around half of the total amount, more or less. Plus, covering six manga in one piece is going to be long enough, as it is; maybe if this piece performs decently enough I'd be willing to cover the other half another time. I'll go over this sextet in English release order, starting with one of those three titles whose cancellations were confirmed in late 2004!

Obscusion B-Side: The IF Neverland Reportage: The Second Neverland War

Previously on The IF Neverland Reportage:

"Without a doubt, this was a time of experimentation from Idea Factory....but there's still a good amount of importance to be found here, at least with Spectral Blade, Suna no Embrace and, to a lesser extent, Kingdom of Chaos, when it comes to the overall lore & timeline of IF Neverland. Humanity, now wielding absolute power (&, in turn, becoming corrupted absolutely), have become the subjugators themselves... Understandably, this isn't sustainable & eventually something's going to break under the pressure, just as it did when Chiffon killed Overlord Janus."

After the year 2000, Idea Factory would pretty much become almost exclusively focused on video games that took place in the fantasy world of Neverland for the next few years, with mid-2001's Run=Dim as Black Soul for the Sega Dreamcast being the sole exception & that wasn't even developed by IF, instead being handled by Yuki Enterprise, which would later become Examu & is now Team Arcana. Indeed, from 2001 to 2003 Idea Factory would develop (in-house) & release eight different games in what would eventually be called the IF Neverland franchise, and that coincidentally matches perfectly with the next part of this multi-part "Reportage" I've been working on whenever I have the time. This also marks the point where Idea Factory started truly experimenting on non-Sony consoles, as while the PlayStation 2 winds up being the primary hardware of choice of Idea Factory for the next decade or so we do see Nintendo's GameCube & Microsoft's Xbox get some love this time around, too, with the latter even being the exclusive home to one of the games we'll be going over for this third part of The IF Neverland Reportage.

Also... we get some truly awesome theme songs for the games from here on out. Prior to this, I'd say that only truly "great" theme song for an IF Neverland game so far has been "Break Out!!" by Ai Maeda for Spectral Force: Lovely Wickedness, though I do give a shout out to Spectral Blade's OP ("Hateshinaki Tabibito" by The Permanents) for being a completely out of left field choice, but from here on out we truly get (for the most part) "banger after banger after banger after banger".