During the brief time period that Bandai Entertainment tried to be a manga publisher in the US, the majority of their titles were manga spinoffs to the shows they licensed. They clearly hoped that name recognition alone would carry them, but titles like this one demonstrate why that strategy didn't work.
EUREKA SEVEN: GRAVITY BOYS & LIFTING GIRL (Eureka Seben Guravuiti Boizu & Rifutingu Garu), based on the original story by BONES and script by Dai Sato, with art by Miki Kizuki. First published in 2005 and first published in North America in 2007.
PLOT:
Sumner Sturgeon comes from a rich family and everyone expects him to follow in his father's footsteps and join the military. Sumner himself doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. What he does know is that he loves lifting, a sport where people surf on the air. He'll even sneak off-campus to participate in secret tournaments, although his real goal is to observe the rising star known only as B.B.
In truth, B.B. is actually Ruri, a poor girl who poses as a boy so she can get around the rules and use her lift boarding skills to get herself out of the slums. The two meet by chance, the first of many intersections between their very different lives and what lifting means to them and those around them.
STORY:
You're probably wondering the same thing I wondered while reading this: where's Renton? Where's Eureka? Where's the Nirvash? Alas, aside from all the sky surfing and the occasional reference to things like LFOs, there's not a lot in Gravity Boys & Lifting Girl to tie this story to Eureka Seven. That's a shame because Eureka Seven is one of the best original mecha shows of the 2000s with a compelling plot and strong cast of characters while this is a really tedious slice-of-life drama of mostly indistinct characters from a pair of tie-in PS2 games that no one outside of Japan played.
Ok, that's a little harsh. Only half of this story is tedious, namely the parts about Sumner. Ruri at least has actual problems to overcome, being a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks trying to compete in a sport that seems to have an explicit "no girls allowed" rule. She simply wants to make enough to live a comfortable life and pursue the sport she loves, even if it means hiding her identity and doing odd jobs to make those dreams happen. She at least is committed to something.
In comparison, Sumner's problems are so insignificant. He's a poor little rich boy who doesn't want his family's identity and wealth to define his life and isolate him from the world, but he has no idea what he wants to do and lacks the willpower to do anything decisive. The only thing he seems to feel strong about is lifting and the mysterious B.B., but the most he ever does about that is sneak off of his rich kid school campus on the regular to lift and to make friends with some of the poor kids who previously tried to bully him. Otherwise he's just hosting his own little self-pity party in his head, oblivious to all the petty school dramas going on around him.
You would think that this would all be leading up to a star-crossed romance between Sumner and Ruri. That's certainly the direction it seems to be going when Sumner stumbles upon Ruri taking off her binder, a moment that's just as much a meet-cute as it is fanservice. Yet somehow Sumner doesn't make the connection between the supposed boy he was chasing and the girl he runs into along the way, so the two part ways afterwards and the rest of the volume follows their very different and largely divergent stories. It's not even being teased at this point. Is Miki Kizuki holding it back for the second volume? Are they subverting the readers' expectations by comparing and contrasting these two very different lives? It's hard to say at this point. All I do know for sure is that it's not interesting enough to keep my attention.
ART:
Another good thing about Eureka Seven are the character designs by Kenichi Yoshida, whose quirky yet realistic style stood out in the era of moeblobs and has aged incredibly gracefully. Yoshida was also character designer on the games this manga is based upon, but you'd never guess that from looking at Kizuki's art. Her take on the characters is decidedly less interesting, with far more generic faces with bigger eyes and plainer mouths. Her paneling is messy with lots of overlapping and she doesn't seem confident at drawing any sort of action.
She relies mostly on speed lines, which just further adds to the clutter inside the panels. She also doesn't let the reader get much of a look at the world these kids live in. Even when Sumner and Ruri are literally soaring above it all, we don't get much of a visual sense of the freedom and space they feel in the air, which only serves to undercut the only emotional thread connecting these two.
ART:
This manga is published digitally by Viz, and previously by Bandai Entertainment. This series is complete in Japan with 2 volumes available. Both volumes were released; the physical volumes are out of print, and the digital volumes are still available via most major ebook vendors.
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