Manga Based on Anime: why even Bother?

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Aside from Evangelion, which is a special case considering who the author is, I haven`t seen one manga based on an anime that lives up to its predecessor, while the reverse is possible most of the time.

Usually, manga based on an anime are rediculously short, hastily drawn, and often compress or entirely leave out key events and charachter sequences.

How is it that the manga adaptation for any ~50 episode gundam series has never been longer than 5 volumes? What is the purpose of such a compressed, bare-bones interpretation of a work?
 
No clue, a similar issue was present with the Tokyopop manga adaptations of Adventure-Tamers for Digimon (Frontier never saw English release).

Though I have to say that in that case, with Zero Two, I appreciated it. Usually, though, yeah, it's better to have it be a MANGA first, and then have the anime adapted.
 
The reason why manga adaptations are made of anime series because manga is bigger in Japan than anime is. Thus, there will always be an attempt to make something like Gundam appeal to a manga reader. However, because of spoilers and such yeah, the manga is almost always truncated to a point where it can potentially become unreadable (SEED Destiny's manga adaptation is far worse than the anime because the mangaka trimmed so much off, to the point where it doesn't even flow properly, much less make sense).
 
I agree. The reason manga are almost guaranteed to become anime is that anime has so many elements that manga can't have, like animation, full color, sound effects, music, and voices. If an anime is made into a manga, it can only lose these things, and many original anime are made to work off those things.
 
I don't know, I've found several examples of Anime-based manga that were good.

The El-Hazard manga followed the OVA plot and characterizations (The Phantom Tribe, Ifurita) but incorporated the best parts of that lame TV Wanderers series (The teenage Rune Venus, Makoto's science abilities) with its own ideas (More Demon GoRAB!). It also had some great moments like Makoto relating to Ifurita's plight or Ifurita's dilemma in threatening Makoto's life.

The Tenchi Muyo manga was also pretty good, especially the (as far as I know) ending. It used the same 'new girl gets Tenchi and threatens the family status quo' plot from Tokyo and Forever, but IMO this adaptation is the best version of it. The girl in question is a more convincing siren for Tenchi than Sakuya and Haruna put together! (And I use siren in the strictest term- as someone that really gets Tenchi's attention- considering this woman's identity!)
 
I kind of saw it as being for the same reason we get comics and movies of TV shows here. Alot of the manga you're discussing are usually printed in manga anthologies and read pretty quickly. So that's about 10 minutes each month vs half an hour every week.
 
I second this...
Read though both mangas and they were both great. I really would have loved to have seen them animated, instead of some of the other stuff they did animate. Nice plot lines, Love some of the manga-only characters. And i found the little side stories to be hilarious
 
POkemon and Tenchi are different. Those are actually telling their own stories the universe rather than just repeating the anime.

That's like comparing gundam seed Astray manga series to the Gundam seed manga adaptation of the anime. THOSE are the type I`m talking about.

I actually have all 22 volumes of the tenchi manga, and it is good, but about 1/3 into the "All-New" series the writer simply stopped caring and made all of the chapters until the very last volumes random filler crap that no one cared about.
 
Outside of the manga adaptions for the movies, I thought the Pokemon Special/Adventures series is more based on the games than the series. Then there's also the Pokemon Magical Journey series that wasn't based on either the games or the anime series.

I think that the Yu-Gi-Oh! GX manga is quite good. It pretty much starts off some time after the first episode of anime series, or it feels like that to me, and then it goes off on a different route than the anime series did. To be honest, as much as I love the GX anime series, as it did get better over time for me, the manga pretty much has done some of the aspects I wanted more in the series, less pointless characters, more character development and less focus on Jaden, and put it in the manga.
 
Mmm yes. The ones that just repeat and condense the series are worthless, usually (with the exception of EVA, as already said).

Now, I do like side stories and spin-oRAB in manga. Something the anime didn't have time to do, or a what-if story. Continuations are also nice... like if a show gets canceled being able to follow it in comic form. Well all this goes for all kinRAB of tv shows, not just anime.
 
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