Manga. What sets manga apart from every other storytelling medium including western comics, anime, and any permutation of film is that it’s so relatively cheap to produce. Usually printed in black and white, as long as you have the creative chops there’s nothing stopping you from drawing your dream story. That’s why unlike movies and TV, there’s manga about everything; Wine manga like Drops Of God, Gambling comics like Kaiji, heck there’s even myriad manga about making manga. Yet, among the tens of thousands of serialized Japanese comics due to its fusion of gritty art and an overabundance of humanity, Dorohedoro stands apart. An anime adaptation of the cult hit comic was announced around a year ago but there was radio silence for a long time.
However! Recent rumors suggest that Dorohedoro could launch as soon as next January and that in the coming week we’ll hear something definitive about it. Even if these rumblings turn out to not be accurate, it’s always a good a time as anime to start getting people ramped up for what could be a really neat show. Details like who’ll be directing or animating it haven’t been revealed yet, but I hope the only reason it’s taken so long for the info to come out and the show to materialize is because the production team’s making sure to get this one of a kind story right.
Dorohedoro stars a man who woke up one day with an alligator head and his partner in crime Nikaido. They travel back and forth between two dimensions, neither pretty, hunting sorcerers. The series’ original creator Q Hayashida used to intern from the iconic Tsutomu Nihei and reading her work, there’s a lot in common with something like Blame! but it has a lot more charm and humanity than that. The manga’s the stuffed anime you find in a pile of rubble after the world’s been destroyed; Bleak, but there’s still some sense of warmth in the world. It’s hard to imagine the anime getting it all right, but even if it only succeeds at capturing the feel I’ll be happy.
We’re supposed to hear more about the Dorohedoro anime this week.