The longest running manga series in the U.S., Rumiko Takahashi’s world famous Ranma 1/2 has come to a close after 13 years. Last month Viz Media published volume 36, the concluding volume of the series.
“It’s one of the first manga to make it big here, in Europe, and other parts of the world, like South America,” said Ishikawa Koichi, manager of English-language licensed manga at Kinokuniya in New York. “It’s one of the bestsellers,” Koichi said, also pointing to Inuyasha, also by Takahashi, as the store’s most popular DVD anime series.
Ranma 1/2 is about Ranma Saotome, a teenage martial artist, and Akane Tendo, a neighborhood girl, who are arranged to wed by their parents. The plan is met with a series of obstacles because Akane hates boys and Ranma is cursed by a magical hot spring that turns him into a girl when he touches cold water, and back into a boy when he touches hot water.
According to Urian Brown, editor of the series, Ranma was the first big manga hit in America. “It’s a manga that many fans cut their teeth on,” he said.
Viz first began publishing the series in 1993 before the tankubon (digest-size books), or graphic novel, boom in this country. Back then, the company serialized it in traditional American comic book/pamphlet form. It also tried coloring the black and white series in an effort to make it more recognizable to comic book readers in America, an effort that was short-lived. “It looked funny,” Brown said. “It didn’t work well.”
The series was eventually bound and hit the market in its current book form in 2002. Since then, the first edition of volume one of Ranma has been in reprint 17 times. The second edition has been reprinted five times.
Brown attributes Ranma’s popularity to Takahashi’s appeal to a wide audience through her creative storytelling and visual style. “It’s really funny, cute, the characters were charming,” he said. “And it has a wacky, gender-bending twist. At the time, that was a surprise when it first came out.”
Rumiko Takahashi started work on Ranma 1/2 in 1987. It concluded in Japan in 1996, not long after its introduction to the West. Ranma gave Takahashi, called the princess of manga and also one of the richest people in Japan, international superstardom. “It’s got a lot of energy,” Brown said of the series. “I don’t know of any other female manga creator who draws in a shonen style with a female sensibility.”
Takahashi’s other series include Inuyasha and Maison Ikoku. While there is no talk of a Ranma 1/2 box set (“It would be really heavy,” said Brown), fans can enjoy the farewell Takahashi wrote specifically for her American fans in volume 36.
“We’ll have this license for many years,” Brown said of the gateway series that helped give manga a foothold in the American book market. “When you have a really good story, it will last longer than any trend. Ranma falls in the category of timeless story.”
