Even among the very few people who have taken notice of this impressive anime season's crown jewel (of black steel), the manga adaptation has flown under the radar. This is unfortunate, as the manga also comes from a very interesting creator: the duo of writer Yoshiaki Tabata and artist Yuki Yogo. You probably don't know these guys. It's okay, I don't know them very well either. But I know one of their works, and in this case one is enough. These dudes made Akumetsu, an insane revenge fantasy in which a young man gets total nonsense superpowers and uses them to personally murder everyone who had a hand in ruining the Japanese economy. Reading one chapter of Akumetsu is equivalent to having ten gallons of irrational angry-young-man rage injected into your bloodstream. If there is anybody who should be adapting Go Nagai, it is these guys.
Fortunately for us, they've gone Imagawa's route and created something new with the property. This Shin Mazinger is an entirely different story from either Nagai's original work or the encyclopedic Nagai epic that Imagawa is working on right now. The first chapter is a surreal dream sequence in which Kouji is disintegrated by a humanized version of Minerva X, the girl Mazinger who dated Mazinger and died not long afterwards on the TV show many, many years ago. (You can watch that episode here, subtitled in Italian, or a Spanish dub. English? Of course not, this is a robot anime!) Kouji then rises from the ashes in Mazinger Z as his theme song plays (no, seriously, they've actually just put the words to Kanjite Knight directly on the page.)
In the first chapter proper, of course, Kouji wakes up in the middle of class screaming MAZIN GO at the top of his lungs. In this story, Kouji has a bit of an issue with reality: he's remembering weird stuff like the previously-mentioned dream sequence and even an early scene of Nagai's original manga. He has no idea why, of course, and he's never even seen Mazinger or anything like it. Back at the Photon Power Labs, crazy grampa Juuzou has hijacked the place and demands to see Kouji and Sayaka (unlike the anime, these two are immediately positioned as a couple). Long story short, they see Mazinger standing there, and Kouji completely loses his shit and punches a robot about twenty feet with his bare hands. And that's when the disembodied head of Kouji's father appears!
The Akumetsu team leave no doubt that they were the right choice for the job here: who needed extreme closeups of guys screaming with GIANT TEXT on the page more than Mazinger? Nobody, of course. Unfortunately, Shin Mazinger Zero has yet to be translated by anybody. The best you're going to get right now is here, where I got the prologue and the first chapter untranslated, with an English script included for the first chapter. I do know a certain somebody working on a scanlation of that first chapter, seeing as there's a script, but I make no guarantees.
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