Manga can make even the most mundane subject seem fascinating. It could be the most ordinary thing, yet turns out to be quite great.
For Crossing Time, it’s not quite great now. But it’s off to a solid start considering it all revolves around railroad stories.
The author, Yoshimi Sato, is drawing stories involving different girls and women and their experiences at a railroad crossing. If you watched the anime, you know the two girls experiencing love and the siblings who decide to text each other instead of speak words to each other is in comic form, among a few others.
Two stories that weren’t adapted, however, involve a girl who grew up thinking she was under the railroad crossings’ hypnosis, and the other a perverted student trying to film a girl he likes. The railroad myth mostly just involved getting the school girl to shake her butt and shout “Pomade!” in front of the crossing to ward off evil. That was two parts. (The second part brought in her friends to cross with her. Or just “friend.”) The girl and the boy part overall was decent enough, though that’ll depend on your tolerance for generic dude being a horndog and whether you think the two have any chemistry.
I can sorta see why those stories weren’t adapted.
The best one was the railroad crossing poet, Utake, who combines pretentiousness and grace to form two stories where she realizes something is wrong each time. Whether it’s her giving up and cursing or breaking her notebook as the train passes by, her parts were definitely the best. That’s pretty weird because I don’t think I cared for her stories that much in the anime. This could be a case where the timing just worked a lot better in comic form than in animated form. Or maybe it’s because of how it was drawn.
Crossing Time in manga form kinda benefits from the author explaining some of the railroad crossing walks being referenced. Some of it’s pretty basic, but then there’s one where it has something to do with the most popular basketball manga of all time? Stuff like that helps what ultimately will be a hit or a miss couple of chapters. Some stories will be kinda cute or funny, others will be “what a waste of pages.” If you are in need of something simple and well drawn, though, this could be worth a shot; otherwise, your mileage will vary.