In 1991, an El Viento manga adaption was published in across four issues of Beep! Mega Drive, a Japanese SEGA magazine. The story involves Annet being chased down by members of the Hastur cult, who want to take her pendant. Inside the pendant is a special jewel, which contains a terrible power. The only characters from the game to appear in the manga are Annet, Restiana and Henry.

The manga is separated into four "stages", with each stage consisting of 10 pages, with there being 10 pages featured in each relevant issue of Beep! Mega Drive. The first stage contains 10 pages of story, however the remaining three stages feature a bonus "El Viento Club" section on the last page, where Annet herself talks to readers about various aspects of the game's story and characters.

Unfortunately the manga was never finished, and ends on a cliffhanger. The reason for this is because the manga's artist, Kazutoshi Yamane, had an accident, which left him unable to work on it any further. A full explanation about this was published in Beep! Mega Drive, which can be read at the bottom of this page.

What follows below is a complete English translation of the manga. I need to give a couple of shout-outs to the people who made this possible:

Akane -who uploaded the issues of Beep! Mega Drive to RetroCDN, allowing me to create much higher quality rips of the manga pages.

shmuplations -for accepting my comission to get this manga translated into English.

And now on with the manga! Click on any image to be taken to a larger version on a seperate page. Each page has got links on it so you can cyle through each image. Each page also lets you click on the image, taking you to a higher quality version of each manga page -useful for the El Viento club stuff.

STAGE 1
Published in the July 1991 issue of Beep! Mega Drive.

-So one of the biggest differences in the manga adaption is with Henry. He's Annet's adoptive father, and is a also referred to as being a "famous archeologist". It seems he was given Earnest's backstory here. Unlike Earnest, he's also a Father at the church. However, in the game, he's one of the main bad guys, who is the leader of the Hastur cult. His appearance on the first page is his only appearance in the entire manga, and it's mentioned he's been missing for a month. It's not clear what had happened to him.

-The jewel is this extremely important plot device in the manga, as we'll find out later on. Whilst Annet does have this jewel In the El Viento game, it's just for show and is never mentioned at all. It seems Wolf Team were inspired by the manga, as the jewel would become of great interest in Annet Futatabi.

-The jewel is referred to in different ways throughout the manga, sometimes as the "sealing stone", other times as the "sealing crystal", othertimes as a "jewel" alone. shmuplations mentions that whilst "sealing" is an exact translation, this makes it sound like the jewel is used to seal Hastur away, when in reality it's supposed to be used to unseal him. Just roll with it.

-Annet is seen praying in a church one page 3, this may have been referenced in the intro for Annet Futatabi, where she's briefly shown praying near the start of it.

STAGE 2
Published in the August 1991 issue of Beep! Mega Drive.

-Restiana refers to Mike Baldwin under his codename of "Jekyll", which is quite appropriate given his personality.

-The El Viento club section has Annet mention that Wolf Team's next game, Earnest Evans, is for the Mega Drive. The problem here is the game was released for the Mega CD. This was probably just a mistake made by the writer, but there's a slim chance Earnest Evans was originally going to be a Mega Drive game before development shifted to the Mega CD. The game was eventually released in cartridge format, but only in America, and well after this manga was published.

-Also in this section, Annet reveals, rather oddly, that she can't use her magic without the clothes she has. Exactly why she can't use magic isn't revealed, although it does get mentioned again in the next club section.

STAGE 3
Published in the September 1991 issue of Beep! Mega Drive.

-Stage 1 stated the year was 1923. Stage 2 doesn't mention the year, but this stage does, stating it's 1925. This isn't the end of this error, as stage 4 will reveal.

-Annet doesn't seem to have much of a plan, and has gone to the Hudson River for no real reason.

-Restiana finds out the reason Annet survived jumping off the building was because of the jewel's power, although it's never shown how Annet used the jewel to save herself.

-The club section mentions that Annet needs her bandanna to be able to use magic. This is not something mentioned anywhere in any of the games.

STAGE 4
Published in the October 1991 issue of Beep! Mega Drive.

-This part states the year is 1927, which is different to what the year was listed as in two of the other parts. This clearly seems to be an error, as at most there would be a day, or even a few hours, between each part of the story. In the game the year is 1928.

-The club section has Annet mention that her village was led by a "magician" who worshipped Hastur. This is possibly a reference to the Priest boss featured in level four of Earnest Evans, who intended to sacrifice Annet.

-The club section also reveals that there are said to be numerous ways to revive Hastur. This seems to hint that whilst Annet was able to seal him away in the games (as seen in the ending for Earnest Evans), the Hastur cult were still able to revive Hastur via a sacrifice in El Viento.

STAGE...ABOUT THAT...
Published in the November 1991 issue of Beep! Mega Drive.

-Maasaki Uno states "we will do our utmost to insure accidents like this do not happen again". Exactly how Wolf Team planned to stop their illustrators from being in horrible bike accidents remains unclear.

-The magazine's editor mentions that "the story is reaching a climax" so there may not have been much left of it to publish. Unfortunately nothing is mentioned about what was going to happen in the manga's unpublished parts. At a guess I would think that Trigger would rescue Annet before Mike Baldwin could perform the ritual, perhaps he would even kill Baldwin. But then maybe Restiana would kill Trigger after that. Perhaps there'd then be a showdown between Annet and Restiana? That's just speculation from me though.

-Kazutoshi Yamane -who was credited under his pen name of Tetsuya Ueno -thankfully made a recovery. There doesn't seem to be much information about him on the net, but was the artist for Gamble Fish, a manga published between 2007 and 2010. Whilst it doesn't appear to have been published outside of Japan, I'm guessing it was a success due to how long it was published for.