Because you can only have your protagonist faceplant into a girl’s crotch so many times before it starts to get old…

Anime News Network reports that “The Shinji Ikari Raising Project” will be ending with vol. 18 next year.  (Man, where was this when I was looking for something interesting to use as a lead-in to yesterday’s post?)  To which I can only say, “It’s about goddamn time!”  While the series initially started off as a fun riff on the characters of the seminal anime series being thrust into a school setting, it has since devolved into, well… crap.  Not even Carl Horn’s localization skills, nor the book’s gloriously irreverent version of Gendo Ikari could elevate the past few volumes and their use of rote, tired comedy cliches.  I’m honestly impressed that the series has lasted as long as it did, but you’ll find few brands as durable as “Evangelion” in manga or anime these days.  People really will buy just about anything from this franchise and I’m sure the series’ mangaka Osamu Takahashi has appreciated the steady work the title has afforded him for the past decade.

I realize that I’m guilty of subsidizing such mediocrity with each volume of this series that I buy.  Yet with the end in sight, I’m thinking maybe I should just ride it out, re-read the series once Dark Horse finishes publishing it, and then do a podcast to close off the whole bloody stump of the affair.  It is interesting to note that the series has been the company’s most successful new title in a while given that vol. 15 will be out next month and a couple volumes have even managed to top the New York Times’ manga bestseller list.  I imagine such success is why they keep bringing over manga spun off from popular anime regardless of its quality.  This stuff sells, but I’ve yet to read one that approaches the quality of Dark Horse’s own licensed work.  At this point, I’d trade all of “The Shinji Ikari Raising Project” for an original “Evangelion” comic written by Horn with art from (let’s say) Adam Warren.  I have no idea whether or not such a project would ultimately be good (or, let’s face it, even representative of a good idea at this point), yet it excites me more to think about it than await the final four volumes of this particular title.