POBB February 1, 2022

Pick of the Brown Bag

February 1, 2022

by

Ray Tate

Hello, is it me you're looking for? I'm Ray Tate, the creator/writer of the Pick of the Brown Bag.  A weekly comic book review blog.   If you haven't the time for the lengthier post you can always find a quick judgement on twitter: #PickoftheBrownBag.

Cowboy Bebop, the animation, impressed the hell out of me.  It's vibe, different.  The Japanese voice artists often understated in their performances.  Horrified that the series lasted only one season but surprised that the creators conceived an ending filled with existential wallop.  

As I started to delve into the history and the making of Cowboy Bebop, I became even more enraptured by how all this jazzy  magic blended together.  

Cowboy Bebop on the surface is science fiction.  The Bebop is a carrier ship piloted by Jet Black.  

He and his best friend Spike Spiegel hunt bounties placed on the heads of the galaxy's most dangerous game.  At least that's what it reads in the bounty hunting brochure.

Mostly, Jet and Spike scrape together bounties on hapless idiots to fuel and repair The Bebop and The Swordfish, Spike's craft. The meager remains of the payoff may be enough to add meat to their stir-fry meals.  Though, this dream often remains elusive.

The animation addresses food and hunger quite a bit; though not starvation.  Cowboy Bebop is not a dark...anything.  One episode, one of the funniest, even found the crew under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms.  Another takes the sting out of unknown alien beasts through a culinary means.

Faye Valentine attaches herself to The Bebop after a sponsor rescinds the bounty on her noggin.  Faye is as duplicitous as Lupin III's  Fujiko Mine but unlike Fujiko woefully unsuccessful.  An unlucky gambler, Faye finds herself in dire straits almost every episode.  She loses bounties.  She backstabs.  She attempts to horde the targets for herself.  All these actions usually blowup in her face and leave her on the whole penniless and peckish.  

The only character on The Bebop that has her act together is the little girl hacker Edward.  Unfortunately for the crew of The Bebop, Ed is the only one that understands the act.  

The crew also adopted a supposedly super-intelligent dog named Ein.  The strange thing about Ein though is that he acts like a normal dog.

Titan, the same quality outfit that publishes licensed prose novels, Doctor Who and Hard Case Crime comics, takes up Dan Waters', Lamar Mathurin's and Roman Titov's original Cowboy Bebop adventure.  

As you can see by the cover this book is meant to reflect the live-action adaptation of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop.  Fortunately for we who never saw that business, artist Lamar Mathurin takes the anime designs, mixed with the look of the Netflix costuming, and blends that with his own lanky character style.  The result? He turns Waters' story into a peppy visual narrative that neither replicates the anime nor the live action show.  It's the best way to go, if you ask me.

Colors by Roman Titov also mimic the distinctive neon western look of Cowboy Bebop.

Writer Waters incorporates the announcements during the anime's opening in the dialogue of The Bebop crew's target d'jour.  A chap named Melville, who turns out to be as tricky to catch as the white whale.

The Skull Emoji which I assume to be courtesy of letterers 

Richard Starkings and Jenny Betancourt adds another level of cartoon inventiveness

Faye, doing her job for once, tracks Melville within a casino.  Spike meanwhile in another part of the building finds a complication.

Waters sagely demonstrates two themes in Cowboy Bebop.  The crew's sometime overkill force is frequently justified when the hapless convict under the gun becomes surprisingly dangerous.

The distractions and the countermeasures Melville employs leave the crew empty-handed, which may be a good thing.

Thanks to Faye, for once thinking ahead, Jet, she and Spike go off to hunt Melville only so far discovering a wide array of oddballs.  The whale remains hidden and demonstrates his lethality when Syndicate goons attempt to scamper off with the bounty itself.

I honestly didn't expect this level of enjoyment from a tie-in from a cancelled Netflix series, but Cowboy Bebop the comic book should please fans of the anime.