What is Evangelion: Angelic Days?

Evangelion: Angelic Days is a manga by Fumino Hayashi, serialised in Monthly Asuka from 2003 and collected in six volumes in Japan. Its premise comes from a short sequence near the end of the television series, in which Shinji imagines an ordinary world where he and Asuka are childhood friends, Rei is a transfer student, and no Evangelions exist. Angelic Days builds that glimpse into a complete story.

The tone is the point. Instead of Angels and NERV, the conflicts are school festivals, misunderstandings and a love triangle, drawn in a soft shojo style that could hardly sit further from Sadamoto's main manga. Familiar characters appear in altered roles, and the series is openly aimed at readers who wanted to live longer in that two minute alternate world than at mecha fans.

In English the series was published by ADV Manga in six volumes in the mid 2000s, at a time when ADV held the Evangelion television licence in North America and was building a small library around it. Those English volumes are now long out of print, which makes complete English sets noticeably harder to assemble than the still common Japanese ones.

For collectors sorting Evangelion manga, the filing rule is simple: Angelic Days is a licensed spinoff, not part of Sadamoto's 14 volume retelling, and its Japanese title, Shin Seiki Evangelion: Kotetsu no Girlfriend 2nd, ties it to the Girlfriend of Steel video game line that used the same school setting. Check the author credit, Hayashi rather than Sadamoto, before paying main series prices for a volume.