The third story sees a man placing a bounty on himself, and sets up a game for bounty hunters to catch him. However, there’s a catch; the bounty hunter must be a female. If a male catches him, they won’t get the money. This particular story has a strong focus on Faye Valentine, since she’s the main female bounty hunter in the series. This story also makes a major reference to the song “Nowhere Man” by the Beatles.
The final story in this volume sees bounties being placed on Faye, Spike and Jet. It turns out to be a storyline that has an emphasis on Jet, because one of the major characters in the storyline is a former partner of Jet’s when he was a cop.
While I’m not sure where these stories would actually fit into the Cowboy Bebop timeline, I still found them to be an enjoyable read. I also thought that the feel and tone of these stories are rather similar in nature to the stories presented in the anime series.
The only real drawback for me is the art, simply because I was familiar with the anime series before reading this manga. While the characters look similar enough between the two different mediums, there was something about how they look in the manga that just doesn’t quite work for me; the worst offender is this regard is Spike Spiegel. While Jet and Ed are a little “off,” it’s not quite as noticeable as it is with Spike. Faye was definitely the closest in resemblance between the anime and the manga.
Overall, though, I think readers who are already familiar with the Cowboy Bebop anime series would get the most enjoyment out of this manga series. This is mainly due to the fact that there’s really no background information given; I assume that the creators of the manga assumed that readers would already be familiar with the anime series.
Article comments
1 - Jim Croon
A little bit of a late review, as this is already out of print by several years. It's a terrible spin-off manga that has very little to do with the show other than the basic set-up. The other Bebop manga spin off had even less to do with the show, but was a bit more creative and I would have like to have seen more of it.