Fullmetal: Anime or Manga? BOTH!

As some of you know, I'm not a big manga fan. Sure, there are a couple of series that I really like, Planetes, Akira, Case Closed, among others. And one of these days I know I'll get around to reading Death Note, if for nothing else but to get Ben to stop bugging me about it. Oddly enough there are plenty of anime's that I'm hooked on.

The biggest being Fullmetal Alchemist. While I've seen all the episodes of the show, I just got to watch the movie, Conquer of Shamballa, a week or two ago. It was fantastic, and really made me want to go back and watch the whole series over again. But since I don't have the series(I'm waiting for the box set), I decided I should take a stab at the manga. I read the first volume the other night after work and it seemed to be the same as the show almost scene for scene.

I also grabbed the new volume, 11, that came out this week to see what point they were up to. Now I had heard that the anime only follows the books for the first year, but after that they take really divergent paths. But there were characters in there I had never even heard of, people from the country of Xin, beyond the great desert in the east. Not only that, but it seems some of the core concepts of the book, such as how homuculi are born. Apparently they really haven't gotten into that too much, but it is not the same way they're born in the anime. So its looking like I'll have to start getting this series too, and if you also enjoyed the anime you might want to pick up the manga as well.