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Live-Action Cowboy Bebop Series Gets Comic Series, Prequel Novel
posted on by Adriana Hazra
Technology and entertainment news website Gizmodo reported on Friday that Titan Comics will publish a comic book series by writer Dan Watters (Lucifer, Home Sick Pilots) and artist Lamar Mathurin based on Netflix's live-action adaptation of Sunrise's Cowboy Bebop anime. The publisher will also publish a prequel novel titled Cowboy Bebop: A Syndicate Story: Red Planet Requiem by series staff writer Sean Cummings.
The Cowboy Bebop comic book series will have four issues and will debut in December. The collected edition will will ship as a trade paperback in May 2022. Stanley "Artgerm" Lau (Astonishing X-Men, Captain Marvel) is creating the main cover art. The series will feature a "never-before-seen" story set in the Cowboy Bebop universe.
The prequel novel will ship on November 23, and will center on a young Spike and Vicious. Additionally, a Cowboy Bebop: Making The Netflix Series hardcover companion book will release on January 11, 2022.
Netflix's live-action adaptation of the Cowboy Bebop anime will premiere on November 19. The series stars John Cho as Spike, Mustafa Shakir as Jet, Daniella Pineda as Faye, Alex Hassell as Vicious, and Elena Satine as Julia. Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop anime's composer) is composing the live-action series.
Writer and executive producer Jeff Pinkner teased in April 2020 that the show's staff is planning a second season.
The series is a co-production between Netflix and Tomorrow Studios, with Netflix handling physical production. Tomorrow Studios is a partnership between producer Marty Adelstein (Prison Break, Teen Wolf, producer for the live-action One Piece project) and ITV Studios. Shinichiro Watanabe, the original anime's director, is serving as consultant for the project. Andre Nemec, Josh Appelbaum, Jeff Pinkner, and Scott Rosenberg of Midnight Radio are credited as showrunners and executive producers.
Tomorrow Studios' Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements; Yasuo Miyakawa, Masayuki Ozaki, and Shin Sasaki of Sunrise (the studio that animated the original series); and Tetsu Fujimura and Matthew Weinberg are also credited as executive producers. Chris Yost (Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok) is writing the series, and is credited as executive producer.
The original anime series follows the motley crew of the spaceship Bebop as it travels throughout the solar system in search of the next job. The anime inspired Cowboy Bebop: The Movie in 2001. Funimation released the series on Blu-ray and DVD in North America in 2014, and screened the film in the United States in 2018, the 20th anniversary of the original series.
Top image © Stanley ‘Artgerm’ Lau/Titan Comics
Sources: Gizmodo (James Whitbrook), ICv2 (Brigid Alverson), IGN (Kat Bailey)
