The story follows the attempts of Shuichi Shindo and his band, Bad Luck, to become Japan's next musical sensation, and his struggles to capture Eiri Yuki's heart.
The TV series aired in Japan from October 4, 2000, to January 10, 2001, on WOWOW Wednesdays at 18:30 and was reaired on Tokyo MX in 2007.
[2] The story surrounds an aspiring singer, Shuichi Shindou, and his band, Bad Luck (formed with his best friend Hiroshi Nakano, who is on guitar).
Shuichi wants to become Japan's next big star, and follow in the footsteps of the famous idol Ryuichi Sakuma, lead singer of the now-disbanded legendary group Nittle Grasper.
One evening, Shuichi is looking over lyrics for a song he is writing when his paper is blown away by the wind and picked up by a tall, blond-haired (light brown in the manga) stranger.
This will be their first encounter as Shuichi becomes fascinated by the stranger, who soon turns out to be the famous romance novelist Eiri Yuki (real name: Uesugi).
The story picks up directly after volume 12; Shuichi and Eiri find and agree to momentarily take care of Yuki Kitazawa's son, Riku.
The precursor to the Gravitation manga was a dōjinshi series titled Help!, which followed a similar storyline but cast the characters in slightly different roles.
[10][11] Tokyopop licensed the series for an English-language release in North America and published the twelve volumes from August 5, 2003 to July 12, 2005.
[17] A sequel to the series, Gravitation EX., started to be serialized in Japanese and English[18] in the online magazine Web Comic Genzo.
[24] On May 28, 2014, Murakami published a one-shot based on Gravitation, titled Shindo Family Circumstances (新堂家の事情, Shindō-ke no Jijō),[25] which was followed by a series of the same name on July 28 in Web Spica.
[26] A two-part OVA adaptation was created by Plum, Animate Film, SPE Visual Works, Sony Magazines, and Movic.
There are three insert songs, Part 1 had one called "Spicy Marmalade", with the lyrics, composition, and arrangement done by Mad Soldiers and sung by Kinya Kotani.
An anime television series adaptation was produced by Studio Deen, SME Visual Works, and Sony Magazines and directed by Bob Shirohata.
The opening and closing themes to the TV series are "Super Drive'" and "Glaring Dream", performed respectively by Yosuke Sakanoue and Kinya Kotani.
He looked to see a note left to him by Hiro telling him that he should take the day off, he immediately went to the studios and told them that he was going to ruin their cd release... he was going to quit bad luck.
[37] Rachel Woods notes that even a milder shōnen-ai manga "relies on sexual innuendo, comic double entendres, and coded visual references in order to maintain an erotic undercurrent that is not sexually explicit in nature", and discusses a page from Gravitation which shows the characters kissing, but using "fragmented panels" which show Yuki's "wandering hand" to provide a "tantalizing and suggestive imagery" that encourages the reader's imagination.