The hippest bounty hunters in the galaxy are back! Spike Spiegel, Jet Black and Faye Valentine are on the hunt for new targets, inspired by the hit anime series. Cowboy Bebop blends science fiction, spaghetti westerns, film noir, and jazz music into a new genre that's all about style. As each volume features four stand-alone adventures, this is the perfect time to find out what all the excitement is about.
A collection of volumes first published in Japan within the late 90’s. Art is from Yutaka Nanten while Shooting Star is by Cain Kuga.
This collection is quite rare as it was published back in the 2000’s, and TokyoPop has been out of business for quite some time. The collection box is quite nice and holds up over time, but I wouldn’t go out of your way to try and collect it.
Even though this is made separate from the series (out of Shinichiro Watanabe's vision of the Bebop universe), this manga series spin-off of the show helped with my funk after finishing Cowboy Bebop for the first time.
These do a complete injustice to the show. The stakes are low, the characters are shallow and totally detached from the ones on the show, and it honestly feels to me as though the writers either did not understand or intentionally misrepresented the conceit of the show. The appeal of "Cowboy Bebop" is not its setting or its cool, genre-bending quality but instead the depth and humanity of the characters and the story-telling, imagery, and metaphor. And, of course, it's also about the music.
I cannot blame the writers of these manga for not making them musical-- literature is a mostly non-aural medium-- but I think they failed at every other turn as well and that is almost unforgivable for me. I was really excited to read these, to expand the universe from one of my favourite animated TV shows, and have been heavily let down. Totally irredeemable.