Review: NEON GENESIS EVANGELION: LEGEND OF THE PIKO PIKO MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS

November means mecha manga here at the Manga Test Drive, and that means it's time once more to look at the latest Evangelion gag manga from Dark Horse.

NEON GENESIS EVANGELION: LEGEND OF THE PIKO PIKO MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS (Shinseiki Evangelion: PikoPiko Chuugakusei Densetsu), based on the series by Khara, written by Yushi Kawata & art by Yukito.  First published in 2014 and first published in North America in 2017.

PLOT:

There are enormous, strange creatures threatening to destroy the world...at some point in the future.  In the mean time, the staff at NERV Middle School need to train students to pilot their ultimate weapon: the Evangelion.  It turns out that there are three (later four) perfect pilots, so it's up to Misato to train Shinji, Asuka, Rei, and Kaworu using the best method possible: video games.

STORY:

I should not be bored while reading a gag manga.  Yet reading Piko Piko Middle School was an exercise in Evangelion-related tedium that I have not experience since the time I reviewed The Shinji Ikari Raising Project.

You'd think that the video game angle would bring some degree of novelty, but it's not really central to most of the humor.  Instead, it's just one long extended meta riff on the characters, story, and legacy of Evangelion, made even more meta thanks to Michael Gombos' loose and goofy translation.  The problem is that most of these jokes have been ran into the ground for the last 25 years. There's some running gags that almost work, such as Gendo spoiling Rei to ludicrous degrees or Asuka's foul mouth running up against an arbitrary limit on uncensored F-bombs.  Otherwise, every joke feels like an Eva geek nudging you in the ribs while saying "Hey! Hey! Remember that?  THAT'S FROM EVANGELION! I got that reference!"  The jokes about video games aren't much better.

ART:

Yukito's art isnt' bad, although it's not the sort of art you usually expect from a gag manga.  Theirs is a very detailed, down-to-earth style and they do a good job adapting the original character designs to fit that style. Yet I can't help but wonder if the jokes might have been better served by someone with a looser approach to their art.  There's brief moments where the expressions and body language exaggerate enough to visually sell a moment as comic (mostly at Gendo's expense), but the whole thing mostly comes off as stiff.  It's the visual equivalent of telling your joke in a monotone.

PRESENTATION:

A new Eva manga from Dark Horse means yet another installment of Misato's Fan Corner, aka Carl Horn Talks About Evangelion.  This one is mostly devoted to him talking about the Eva Monkey fansite, and the founder of that site also gets an afterword.

RATING:

I think I would sooner go back and read the hottest takes from the most recent Netflix-induced bout of Evangelion Discourse than I would reread this manga.  Odds are good I'd find more and better jokes there than I would in the entirely of this volume.

This series is published by Dark Horse.  This series is complete in Japan with 4 volumes available.  2 volumes have been released and are currently in print.