In the anime, we barely have time to adjust to the reality that the children are cattle and the kids manage to recruit Ray with the idea of saving all the 37 orphans in Mom Isabella's care when we're presented with a new obstacle in the form of Sister Krone and a new baby. However, the manga is a bit more paced, and so Sister Krone doesn't make her appearance until chapter 5, giving Emma and Norman more time to start planning as well as to realize exactly how little they know about the world outside.

Thanks to this, the readers get to understand the world where the kids live a bit better, which seems to have been the same as ours until something happened in 2015. There’s more attention given to the trackers in the manga too, as Ray posits that they really don’t know how much technology had advanced past the books they have in the library.

Speaking of Sister Krone, she is as terrifying as she is in the anime but in a different way. Unlike her animated version, she doesn’t have a doll to bounce her thoughts off of, and more importantly, she is not given to monologue and show her emotions outwardly. Yes, we get to see all her plans and weird faces, just as in the anime, but they’re all inside her head. The manga makes it clear that her odd behavior is only limited to when she chases the kids in the game of tag, and a little later as she’s looking for evidence to show that Isabella has lost control of her house.

She also spends a bit longer in the house but ends up in the same place as in the anime: betrayed by the system she thought she could trust and leaving behind the seeds for the children to succeed.

Because the manga dedicates 37 chapters to the first arc, as opposed to the 12 episodes that the anime had for their first season, everything has more time to develop. In particular, we get to see and feel the months between Norman’s early shipment and Ray’s birthday and how both Ray and Emma seemed defeated.

The escape itself gets almost 4 chapters, so the twists are more spaced: We get to believe that Ray immolated himself for a bit longer and Emma’s act of desperation to distract Mom is away from the flames, making her tears feel more real and fool some readers into believing that Ray had immolated himself. While the anime did an excellent job adapting the escape, the long chapters that the manga took to narrate the same events helped to showcase every child's contribution better.

Perhaps the biggest change between the anime and the first arc of the manga is how the escape ends. In both versions, Ray is confronted by Norman's image teasing him about how the younger kids were not a burden and the escape is cut with scenes of Mom's past as she races to catch them. But unlike the anime, where she reaches the group just as Emma is the last to run away, in the manga, she arrives when the children are already hidden in the forest and doesn't get to see them.

This makes her goodbye, as she returns to the children that were four and under and stayed at the house, a bit more heart-wrenching. It wasn’t Emma’s steely gaze what made Mom realize it would’ve been nice if she could have loved her kid, it was the understanding that, unlike her, Emma and her siblings were ready to jump into the unknown.