The franchise’s central works, both titled Neon Genesis Evangelion, are an anime and a manga serial, both of which follow the same storyline, although with numerous minor differences between them. The manga, written by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, debuted in the February 1995 issue of Shonen Ace (published in December 1994) and is still running as of 2009. The manga was intended to raise interest for the anime (directed by Hideaki Anno with character designs by Sadamoto), which was in development at that point and was intended to be Gainax’s next major anime release.

The anime consists of 26 television episodes which were first aired on the terrestrial TV Tokyo network from October 4, 1995 to March 27, 1996.^[1] It was later aired across Japan by the anime satellite television network, Animax. The series won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize in 1995 and 1996.

The anime succeeded wildly beyond expectation and has spawned countless derivative works and imitators^[2]. The series established a number of distinctive features of future works in the franchise: a stock set of distinctive characters such as Shinji Ikari, Asuka Langley Soryu, Rei Ayanami, Toji Suzuhara, and others such as Misato Katsuragi (for a complete list, see here); a number of philosophical, psychological, and religious themes; and an idiosyncratic vocabulary of symbols and allusions drawing heavily on Christian and Kabbalistic symbolism, Buddhist beliefs, and the Japanese otaku subculture. Similarly, Evangelion properties consistently focus on a number of themes and dilemmas: