MISC. MANGA, *Space Pirate Captain Harlock

Similar to them taking on the continuing saga of Robert E. Howard's shared universe in The Cimmerian, Ablaze Publishing worked in tandem with anime legend Leiji Matsumoto to do a new take on his "Leijiverse". The new English-language Captain Harlock comic has artist Jerome Alquie coordinating with the creator of the first anime space opera to combine both the original Captain Harlock TV series, as well as the Queen Millennia. This might sound familiar to old school American otaku as one of the several gestalt anime shows where more than one show was fused into a single title like Robotech or Voltron, and was the basis for Captain Harlock And The Queen Of A Thousand Years which brough together two seperate titles into a single narrative due to similar animation and a heavily edited chronology.

In the year 2977, outlaw defender of human freedom, Captain Harlock and his crew of the starship Arcadia continue their crusade when a new alien menace known as the Mazon plot their invasion of the Earth. The Mazon were a race of females that settled down on Earth even before humanity evolved, and they now want to reclaim our world after using all the resources on their own planet. Unfortunately, Earth's government has depleted its own natural treasures. So, the crew of the Arcadia has to maintain an uneasy balance between to conflicting forces which seek to eventually exterminate each other.

This new comic is the first Americanized adaptation of Captain Harlock in over thirty years, the original of which came out in the 80s by Eternity Comics, a subsidiary of Malibu Comics, that eventually was swallowed up by Marvel in the mid-90s. Jerome Alquie's style is reminiscent of motion picture comics where they make an entire comic using screenshots from an existing material like animation. Space Pirate Captain Harlock is a worthy intro into sprawling saga of the Leijiverse by tying several timelines together into a shared plot.