Dream Warrior Wingman

[sun tzu]

Story time:
When I was six, my family moved to France. For a couple years or so, I would watch cartoons in French...before I'd actually mastered the language. So, I was mostly going by the animation and tone of voice to try and understand what was going on.
My favorite at the time was a cartoon that, from my understanding, was called "Wingman". It had this boy who could transform into this spiffy, sci-fi-looking hero who would fight monsters while the bad guys stopped time, and he kept creating new powers for himself by drawing and writing into some kind of magical book. I couldn't make out most of the words, but I still got a kick out of watching it.
Fast-forward a decade or two later. The Internet is here. Some further research tells me that "Wingman" was the French dub of "Dream Warrior Wingman", an anime based on a manga by Masakazu Katsura (the guy behind "Zetman" and "Video Girl Ai", or so I hear). Aaaaand as I check the bookstore today, what do I find? The first volume of the "Wingman" manga, published in French for the first time.

Reading it now, I can finally understand the words. And I discover that apparently, the whole thing is a very genre-aware take on henshin heroes. The main character, Kenta Hirono, is a huge fan of the genre, jumps on the opportunity to become such a hero, and is practically giddy every time it looks like he's about to deal with one of the genre's trope (and annoyed/offended whenever those tropes get subverted).

Anyone else familiar with this manga/anime?

[Holy Spirit]

Anyone else familiar with this manga/anime?

Never heard of it.


It sounds..... original.

[sun tzu]

Never heard of it.


It sounds..... original.

It's...interesting. I'm not too familiar with henshin heroes, sentai, and all that stuff, so I can't really compare, though.

Kenta's adventure begins when he meets a girl called Aoi, who is a refugee from another dimension. Said dimension got conquered by the Big Bad, so she escaped with the story's big honking plot device: The Dream Book, which turns into reality that which is written on it.
Kenta gets his hands on the book, and is...pretty quick to use to make his dreams of henshin heroism come true. This leads Aoi to try to groom him into the kind of hero who can liberate her homeland. She quickly grows impressed with his creativity as he keeps coming up with new techniques and gadgets. Note: This thing isn't omnipotent. Trying to give himself too much power with it quickly runs into the problem that his body isn't quite powerful to handle that, which leads him to start training hard...which includes joining the girls' gymnastic team, interestingly enough (long story).
Another detail I found interesting is that the Big Bad orders his lieutenants not to let the public discover them (hence the use of timestop) because he considers humans, collectively, to be a threat.