Read this for silent book club at the winery back in April, but didn't blog it since it didn't fit in with A to Z. I talked on the other blog about how I'm reading stuff from my childhood, and this matched the book to movie/tv theme they were doing.
Sailor Moon is a lot of firsts for me. I'm pretty sure it's the first show I watched "actively" in that I tried to catch it every day, followed the plot, so on and so forth. I could just sneak it in before I had to leave for school in the mornings (I think it was in the 8AM slot). I still have a soft spot for that dub. It's cheesy, but I don't think it's as awful as people make it out to be, and most of the actresses are pretty good.
It's the first anime that I watched that I was conscious of a difference in style compared to "regular" cartoons. I think I'd probably seen some before then (If I had to guess, I think Noozles on Nickolodeon/my grandma's VHS was probably the first) but Sailor Moon is very 90s anime, with sweat drops, stock footage, and all that good stuff.
It's the first thing I watched that made me want to track down the source material (the dub credits a "original KODANSHA Comic Book") though that'd take years.
Definitely a lifelong love of cheesy shojo anime/manga. The tackier the better.
The manga's not great (it's also 30 years old, so maybe a little slack). I think the Sailor V manga is actually stronger. Sailor Moon runs really fast, and can be kind of shallow because of it. New characters pop up very quickly, but with minimal characterization. By the end of this volume you have: Sailors Moon, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, Luna, the rest of the Tsukino Family, Mamoru/Tuxedo Kamen (very out as Kamen, wears a tuxedo in public, not as Endymion), Queen Beryl, Jadeite, Nephrite, Naru, Umino, Haruna-Sensei, Motoki, and a couple other even more minor characters. It's 5 chapters. Jadeite is already dead by the end. It's like 200 pages.
I read an interesting article (that I can't find now) about how different the production process was for older anime, why filler was so necessary, etc., mostly due to pacing. Napkin math: Sailor Moon (manga) premieres December 28th 1991. The anime premiers less than three months later on March 7th 1992. Episode 25 (roughly coinciding with the end of this volume) hits in September. Chapter 5 drops in April, and corresponds with episode 25 of the show. They had to stretch 5 chapters/months of manga into 6 months and 25 episodes of TV. No wonder there's so many character filler episodes. The end of the first arc would be chapters 13 and 14, which would drop about a month before the TV episodes for them.
Beyond that, I'll be the 9001th person to mention that the manga is considerably more graphic than even the least censored show (the live action?) People get sliced in half and decapitated. Mamoru has a lot less to do in this volume than the equivalent anime, Usagi handles the first several monsters without his help.
I'm reading out of the "Eternal" edition that Kodansha ran in the late 2010s. It's very well produced. Nice paper, strong colors. They keep the kanji for sound effects, which is always a plus. Even little things like the newspapers appear to be fully translated. They kept cute little stuff like the star and moon in Sailor (* Moon (It looks much better, I'm lazy). I was interested to note that they kept the art for the little "creator note" side panels, but didn't bother to translate them. I think the only line I can remember keeping them was the old Viz Shojo Beat imprint and I can't remember the last time I saw a scanlation with them.
All in all, this was fun. It's not a "good" series, but when Takeuchi lets the characters breathe for more than half a panel, they're just as interesting as ever. I might go through the rest eventually (summer project?)
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