"Razorclaw X" wrote:

 ...is this the same Ranma 1/2? Shouldn't that be the other way around?
(The anime never got as serious as the Ryu Kumon story, where someone
actually DIED. Also, the anime's the one with Martial Arts Handwriting
and every other martial art under the sun, too, with Villains of the
Week aplenty; how can the manga be sillier than the anime?)

IMO, the manga is both more and less serious than the anime, in different
stories (in other words, its range of tone is larger).  The Ryu Kumon and
Herb stories are pretty serious, but others (for instance, the haunted
mansion mirror/copy of female Ranma story) are, not sillier, perhaps, but
more whimsical than the anime ever achieves.

Personally, I think the only times the anime ever comes close to the
quality of the manga is in a (very) few of the original stories, for
instance the Chingensai story.  Whenever the two do the same stories,
the anime version is always inferior, as it either trims very funny stuff
(compare the two versions of Shampoo's magic soap, for instance) or pads
to fit the half-hour format (i.e, the extra stuff inserted into Bathhouse
Battle to pad it out).