Cold water makes Ranma Saotome a girl. Hot water makes him a boy again. Neither state gets him out of a fight, and that one gag engine runs for 38 volumes without ever running dry.

Rumiko Takahashi wrote and drew Ranma ½ for Weekly Shonen Sunday from August 1987 to March 1996, and Shogakukan collected the chapters into 38 tankōbon volumes. Ranma has trained in martial arts since early childhood, and an accident on a training journey saddles him with the curse. He spends the run looking for a way to undo it. Nobody around him cooperates, because his friends, his enemies and a surplus of fiancées all have plans of their own.

Takahashi draws for speed. Clean elastic figures, faces that flip from smug to furious inside one panel, fights staged so you can read every impact at a glance. Weekly serialization shapes the rest: short chapters, a hook on the last page, comedy that stays physical. Chases, mistaken identities, somebody going through a wall over a minor insult.

The romance is loud and the martial arts are absurd, and the book knows it. Readers who came up on Takahashi's other long serials will recognize the shape, a crowded cast of lunatics circling one exasperated lead, with jokes repeated until the repetition itself becomes the joke. Thirty-eight volumes is a lot of manga, and the gag engine holds.