MISC. MANGA, *Cobra

Beating out Cowboy Bebop by about twenty years, Cobra(also known as Space Adventure Cobra)is the original space cowboy in anime! Originally a manga series from the late 70s to early 80s, this spawned off several other manga, an anime movie, two OVA series, and two TV series. Only the original anime movie has been released out here so far, but the first manga was also put out in English through Viz Manga, adapted by non-other than Marv Wolfman. The best part of all, the manga was Total Recall before there was Total Recall.

Set in the far off future, a common blue-collar worker named Johnson goes for a virtual reality trip where he's the famous space pirate Cobra. However, the Matrix run activates his old memories as the actual Cobra who was supposed to be dead for several years. Cobra faked his own death to get the evil Guild off his back, and gave himself a different personality to completely disguise himself. Cobra then sets off to stop the Guild once and for all. The Guild's latest venture is to collect three special sisters, each one is tattooed with the map to the fabled Ultimate Weapon that they plan to take over the universe. Cobra runs into one of the sisters, Jane Royal, who is a hot bounty hunter that teams up with him to hunt down her other siblings and foil the Guild's plot.

Creator Buichi Terasawa was very influenced by American films like Star Wars and Flash Gordon, and he was also a student of Osamu Tezuka himself. His art style is extremely appraling, and is very close to American styles of comic book designs. It's worth looking the Cobra comic collections, even though it was never put out in graphic novel format.