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Last week was a slow one for me, comics-wise. My main pleasure was this – finally tracking down a copy of issue #7 of Viz’s old release of Cobra, a Buichi Terasawa manga from the late ’70s/early ’80s about a secret agent-type space hero with a cannon for an arm. This was during Viz’s period of releasing portions of manga series as perfect bound miniseries (at higher prices – Cobra ran $3.25 per issue) which would then sometimes get collected as softcover books, though not in this case. This was also a time of fairly aggressive framing of ‘manga’ as akin to Western comics, so a lot of chest-beating action stuff or fantasy work got translated, all the better if it had some awareness in anime fandom, which Cobra did among miscellaneous sci-fi fans (already aging a bit) who maybe traded tapes of the 1982-83 television anime.

Of course, Cobra ran for 18 volumes in Japan, so Viz’s 12 comic books didn’t get very far into the story. Terasawa would eventually develop into an illustration-oriented, rather cheesecake-y comics artist, but this ’70s stuff bears a lot of Osamu Tezuka’s stamp, in that he started out apprenticing in Tezuka’s studio. This was all part of a plan to somehow become a film director — he did eventually direct some of the anime based on his own comics — which contrasts a bit in approach with the movie pitch comics of today. This is an older kind of comic, even in terms of English adaptation – Marv Wolfman is credited with such, as another means of familiarizing North American audiences with Japanese comics. He has a small essay in issue #7 about discovering the old Cobra tapes while watching anime with Chris Claremont and James D. Hudnall, the latter a prominent figure in manga-in-English, having been (among other designations) one of the souls present for Naoki Urasawa’s first appearance in English in the form of the urban military action series Pineapple Army, though Urasawa (still years off from Monster) was best known as a popular sports mangaka, and anyway was working from scripts by Kazuya Kud? of Mai the Psychic Girl, whose presence I imagine was the real draw (if indeed there was any; the series didn’t run for too long).

And yes, I know I can just buy all these old comics off the internet — issues of Cobra aren’t particularly rare —  but hunting around for missing pieces is part of the fun for me. Many of the following selections are, however, very self-contained or now easier and more collected than ever:

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