A lot of my favorite anime are manga adaptions, and in most of those cases, I don’t just like the anime more than the manga—I don’t even like the manga. Usually I attribute this to my liking the medium of animation more than that of manga, but it’s more true that I have a different set of demands and expectations from the two mediums, and the disconnect between those things in an adaption can make or break the experience for me.
Let’s observe some selections.
First I’ll point out that amongst my favorite anime, none of them is an adaption of one of my favorite manga. Moreover, most of my favorite manga either don’t have an adaption or have an incomplete one.
There’s a big difference between what makes a favorite anime of mine and what makes a favorite manga. My demands of anime cover a broad range, but with manga, it really comes down to the art. I enjoy many aspects of manga art (broken down a lot more on my inactive manga blog, here) but it mostly comes down to style and character designs. Those things are important to anime as well, but they’re everything to my enjoyment of manga.
Another aspect is that manga gives me certain things that anime either doesn’t or outright can’t (or if they can, only in smaller portions. See: Akira). Ridiculously detailed art that usually anime can’t imitate (Jing), or subject matters that couldn’t be profitable to a larger audience (Tokyo Akazukin). Even porn with decent character designs is something manga has in spades, while anime has little of.
That said, it’s perfectly possible for a manga I like to become an anime I like. When it doesn’t work in reverse, it’s because the anime has added a number of things that define the story for me and I don’t want to see it without those things. But anime can carry the stuff I like from a manga and even add to it.
Gunslinger Girl, my all-time favorite manga, was every bit as good in its first adaption. The style, tone, character depth, and amazing writing all made it to the anime adaption, to where they were pretty much 1:1 in terms of how much I cared for them. Soul Eater is a highly stylish, action-packed manga that I love, and the anime adaption enhanced it by upping the style to eleven and animating the action beautifully. For a recent example, Lotte no Omocha was a rare case of a manga I really liked becoming an anime that I really liked for mostly new reasons, without loosing all of the old ones. That’s the kind of adaption where I can enjoy it and the original in totally different ways.
For a manga adaption not to work for me, it means that two things must’ve happened. Firstly, the anime adaption didn’t capture what I loved about the manga; and secondly, the anime adaption didn’t work for me as an anime in itself. This has been the case for a handful of manga in the past (Jing, Working!!, Bleach), and it’s the case for Ao no Futsumashi (AKA Ao no Exorcist; I’m used to the other name).
Which is strange: there’s so much that should make this show a winner. It’s got an awesome vocal cast, is directed by Tensai Okamura (Darker Than Black), and while they’ve mostly been a source of consistent disappointment over the past year, A-1 Pictures is sometimes a great animation studio. What went wrong?
If the anime looked like the color images from the manga, I'd probably love it.
It comes down to one thing: more than anything else, I love the Ao no Exorcist manga for its art. It has a style that I particularly love, rife with thick, sketchy lies, bold usage of blacks, great facial expressions, and cool-looking fights. The anime doesn’t capture that style.
The things the anime does right are things I didn’t care about in the original manga. But as I’ve said before, it’s often the case that I like an anime for its own merits over those of the manga. However, the anime is unsuccessful at meeting my expectations for anime as well. The episodes are poorly paced and the action scenes are boring. While the art and animation are surely above-average, I don’t care for the style at all, and the whole experience falls flat for me.
I can’t really tell you that if you didn’t like the anime of Ao no Exorcist then you should check out the manga, because if what bothers you is the story or characters or anything, then the manga isn’t a whole lot different (the plot has matched up after the initial stuffing of the first chapter into 2 eps). I can only say that I love the manga for its art, while I don’t love the anime for anything.
My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull 
What I like about manga (or let’s just say Japanese comics) is the complex page arrangement: You have all kind of different panels, backgrounds, speech bubbles telling you what’s going on and characters who sometimes even jump out of your standard panel giving you the feeling as the observer you are really following the situation in real life. This is exactly what got me into Manga, not only the story-telling but also the way the artist communicates with his audience. This is a feeling I can’t get from American or French comics (although artists like Will Eisner have tried something like this …. wait, 40 years ago ?). This is part of a reason I don’t like Shoujo Manga a lot, not that they are bad, but while reading it I always get the impression that the artist is more interested in drawing beautiful characters (for example Angel Sanctuary).
However, it’s just to expect that the anime will be very different from the manga. Lucky me ! I don’t know the Ao no Exorcist original manga, so I am still interested in the anime (although these pics in your post look pretty badass !).
I don’t have much of a frame of reference since I do not read hardly any manga but I can understand how the main focus would be the art and character designs. In some ways it seems manga is even more a visual medium than anime. So it makes sense that the basic requirements are the art and character design. I can tell you the few manga I read though I became more interested in based off the story. An exception though would be that I really want to read Letter Bee which looks like it has gorgeous art. I also agree there are some porn mags out there with far better character designs, course having an appealing “protagonist” is pretty key in that type of manga.
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Hi, I’m new! Just ducking in.
Call me weird, but one of the things I couldn’t help but do (going from manga to anime adaptations) was to pause the episodes at scenes where I could tell the animators had lifted a scene from something in the corresponding manga volume. True, I didn’t do it for every adaptation, and I think I did it for a few different types of series.
However, thinking back, I suppose manga really is a lot more visual a medium that we might consciously think on first encounter. All that stuff about bubble placement, panels, and the “narrator”/mangaka’s artistic intent, as Lucus-FeriaaA noted. And then the artwork on top of that. It tends to give me much more of that subconscious, emotional feel that one might have when reading a really well-written book. You know, like when you see a metaphor- or like when the actual form/structure a passage takes expresses some kind of deeper “point.”
Take the case a purposeful image that sharply conveys a certain facial expression; on top of that, the image is arranged a very particular way on the page. All of that calculus-ish, instant-to-instant stuff might be a bit more blurred when you’re watching a series- so it could be harder to notice in an adaptation. And proportionately (i.e. frame by frame), seem to mean a bit less.
A bit long of a response, but know what I mean?
I’m feeling the same for Deadman Wonderland…D:
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