>>10778833Yes, but see
>>10757471The anime was a bad adaptation that already had issues and then diverged entirely from the manga's plot and never adapted the last arc; the manga is one of the best battle shonen ever made
The manga is incredible with tactical fights, really strong character interaction and development, has a lot of both good comedy and cute slice of life stuff while also intense emotional gut punches with both tonal extremes helping the other work better, etc
It also avoids common shonen pitfalls of getting bloated pacing over time, the stakes/power escalation going so insane that it barely feels like the same series, andcharacters getting sidelined. Gash/Zatch Bell only gets tighter pacing the further in you get, never abandons it's extended cast, etc. On the flip side, it does starts off weaker then other shonen: initially the art is kind of rough, intially the fights are sort of simple since characters only have 1-2 spells, and it's intially very villain of the week heavy, with full arcs only occurring further in. It's still good early on, but it only becomes truly great a bit in
The best place to read it is on Mangadex (which includes the end of volume bonuses, the gaiden chapter and the gash cafes many other sites cut out), using the "NEW fan translation" by Zatch Bell Makai (
mangadex.org/chapter/eb924bc6-a2b6-4081-af0d-3b8930a0726e) which has higher res scans, color pages, and fixed translations. The Makai scans are only done through V4 so far, but it'll automatically switch you over to the NULL scans after that. There's also A-Destiny scans starting at V18, which has less mistranslations but stiffer wording vs NULL, but i'd just stick with NULL for the volumes Makai hasn't done yet
See also some bonus resources here:
desuarchive.org/a/thread/199486588/#199490460 like some NULL mistranslation notes, specific moments the anime does do well, and videos which sync up manga only content to the anime music
Also there's a sequel now, see pic
