What is the Cowboy Bebop manga?
Cowboy Bebop began as an anime, so its manga are adaptations rather than sources, and there are two of them. The main manga, drawn by Yutaka Nanten and credited to Hajime Yatate, the Sunrise collective pen name, ran in Kadokawa's Asuka Fantasy DX from 1998 to 2000 and filled three volumes. It tells original bounty stories in the anime's world alongside loose adaptations, drawn in a shojo inflected style that reflects its magazine's audience.
The stranger sibling is Cowboy Bebop: Shooting Star, drawn by Cain Kuga and serialized just before the anime aired in 1997 and 1998, collected in two volumes. Working from early production materials, Kuga produced a parallel version of the crew: designs differ noticeably, Spike's characterization tilts harder and the plots ignore the finished anime. It reads today as an alternate draft of Bebop preserved in print, which is exactly its collecting appeal.
Tokyopop published both series in English in the early 2000s, Nanten's in three volumes and Shooting Star in two, in the flipped, left to right format common to that era's manga releases. Both have been out of print since Tokyopop's original manga line wound down, and no modern English reprint has replaced them, so the secondhand market is the only market.
Expectations should be set correctly: neither manga carries the anime's authority, and neither involves Watanabe or Kawamoto as artists. Their value is documentary and atmospheric, more Bebop tone in a different medium and, in Shooting Star's case, a record of what the series might have been. Kuga's different character designs are the fastest way to tell the two series apart in a listing photo.
Japanese originals are inexpensive and common; the English Tokyopop volumes, especially Shooting Star volume 2, are the scarcer objects. A complete English manga run is five slim volumes total, one of the smallest full sets in this Library, and a good example of print ephemera outliving its modest origins.
