pike Spiegel and his cyborg partner Jet Black are professional bounty
hunters who roam the Sol system, trading live criminals for cold cash.
They're in good company; hundreds of thousands like them jump from planet
to planet--through a series of warp gates--competing to bring in the most
notorious and priciest bad hombres in the system. They even have their own
Wild West-themed TV show, Big Shot, which gleefully lists a daily menu of
valuable fugitives.
Like Big Shot's exaggerated rootin' tootin' hosts, Spike
considers himself a kind of futuristic cowboy. In the opening episode of
this initial volume, he and Jet maintain a cheerful and laid-back country
rivalry as they track down a maniacal killer named Asimov. The illegal drug
their quarry stole and is fencing around town gives him immense speed and
strength, but it's also steadily destroying his mind. While he's rapidly becoming a
dangerous wild card, his beautiful, mild-mannered partner is the real
joker in the deck. Her motivations are as uncertain as her loyalties, right
up to the end.
Asimov may be losing his mind, but Spike and Jet's next target, in
Episode No. 2, doesn't seem to have been in his right mind to begin with. He's
wanted for stealing an experimental "data dog," a common-looking pooch with
no obviously valuable characteristics. When Spike accidentally ends up with
the dog instead of the felon he's after, the entire city disintegrates into
a free-for-all between the dog's prospective owners,
with every loose dog in town butting in on the action.
Fast, frantic and funny
Cowboy Bebop is a stylish, high-tech, cutting-edge series that's
crammed with eye-popping (though irrelevant) digital animation. In soul
and style, it most closely resembles the offbeat, low-tech Lupin
series that pseudonymous manga artist Monkey Punch made famous for its
frantic action and good-natured humor. Spike and Jet are Lupin and
Daisuke, waving their insouciance and their constantly surprising
competence like flags as they incite chaos wherever they go. (Even their
faces, and Jet's Daisuke-like pointy beard, are dead giveaways.)
Where the series' tone isn't clearly familiar from Lupin, it
draws from a variety of other sources, notably American action television
shows circa the 1960s, a la Mission: Impossible. The soundtrack, by
multitalented Macross Plus composer Yoko Kanno, ranges from
Hollywood action jazz (Henry Mancini) to lazy bluegrass (Ry Cooder). While
the computer animation frames the main story with gorgeous 2001: A Space
Odyssey scenes of drifting spaceships and revolving planets, most of
the action takes place planetside and seems to come out of a TV drama/caper
show along the lines of Remington Steele.
It's a bizarre mix, and not generally a coherent one. It tends to
resemble a random grab-bag of American and Japanese TV icons, tossed into a
blender that's set on puree. But it's fast, frantic, and very funny, the animation
is top-notch, and Lupin fans at least will find the characters
warmly familiar. In many ways, this is like seeing the Lupin cast
zapped into a slightly grimmer--if no less silly--future. The only question
is, where's Spike's Zenigata?
