Wing Man

Wing-Man (Japanese: ウイングマン, Hepburn: Uinguman) is a Japanese science fiction manga series written and illustrated by Masakazu Katsura. It was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1983 to 1985, with the chapters collected into 13 tankōbon volumes by Shueisha.

Contents

• Characters
• Anime staff 1984
• References

Wing-Man is the story of Kenta Hirano, a fan of superheroes and sentai television shows to the point where he dreams of becoming such a hero himself. To that end, he creates a superhero of his own called "Wingman," and, much to the chagrin of his teachers, acts out his fantasies of being Wingman at school. When Kenta meets Aoi Yume, the beautiful blue-haired princess of an alternate universe called Podreams, he gets his chance to make his fantasy come true, as Aoi carries a book called a Dream Note which can make any dream come true, and Kenta draws a picture of Wingman in the book, allowing him to become Wingman for real. Kenta, Aoi and Kenta's classmate and love interest, Miku Ogawa, team up to save Podreams from the evil dictator Rimel, who wants to use the Dream Note to take over Podreams, while Kenta deals with his conflicting feelings for both of his female compatriots.

The manga was adapted into an anime television series titled Dream Soldier Wing-Man (夢戦士ウイングマン, Yume Senshi Uinguman) in 1984. It also had a 1984 visual novel adventure game adaptation of the same name, developed by TamTam and published by Enix for the NEC PC-8801 and other Japanese personal computers. It featured a point-and-click interface, where a cursor is used to interact with on-screen objects, similar to Planet Mephius (1983) and the NES version of Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (1985).

The anime, featuring character designs by Yoshinori Kanemori and intended by Toei Animation to be a strong shonen title following the female-targeted Ai Shite Knight, marked the first anime adaptation of one of Katsura's works (Katsura himself would later appear as Wingman in a live-action adaptation of Video Girl Ai) and the debut role of seiyuu Ryo Horikawa as Kenta. The anime's ending is different from that of the manga; the manga ending was never animated but was dramatized with the anime's voice actors on a drama LP. Following the end of the Wing-Man anime, it would be three months before the next Toei TV anime, Konpora Kid, would premiere, marking the first time since Toei's debut TV series, 1963's Ken the Wolf Boy, that the studio had not had an animated TV series airing on TV Asahi (formerly NET).

Both the anime and manga have been released in France; the anime, slightly edited and censored to tone down some of the story's more erotic elements, aired on TF1 in 1989, and the first six volumes of the manga reached the French market in the late 1990s.