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Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Cobra




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bravetailor



Joined: 30 May 2009
Posts: 817
PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 5:09 pm Reply with quote
I remember reading an article a long while back where Terasawa said that Cobra's looks were based on Jean-Paul Belmondo. Again, the french connection.

This is one of my favourite franchises. The Urban Vision dub made me a fan of this character and I've been a Cobra follower ever since.
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Psycho_Despair



Joined: 17 Nov 2009
Posts: 376
Location: East of Eden
PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 11:14 pm Reply with quote
I enjoyed this column a lot today.
I have been wanting to read this manga for a long time.

Where can I read the series?
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Brand



Joined: 30 Jan 2006
Posts: 1028
PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 11:31 pm Reply with quote
I'm like one of the five people who watched the recent Cobra series on Crunchyroll. I adored it. It's almost schizophrenic, the stories very so much from each other, some are pretty simple tales, others have some awesome fantastical concepts, but the series holds together on atmosphere which this has a lot of.

I'd love to get my hand on the manga someday, I'll have to look around for the back issues. Sadly I do no own an iphone though.
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster


Joined: 07 May 2005
Posts: 357
Location: San Francisco
PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 11:34 pm Reply with quote
Psycho_Despair wrote:
I enjoyed this column a lot today.
I have been wanting to read this manga for a long time.

Where can I read the series?


It's available for iPhone. Also, it was published by Viz, but the back issues might be impossible to find.
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GATSU



Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 15279
PostPosted: Fri Nov 12, 2010 12:04 am Reply with quote
Quote:
His work never had a huge following in America (perhaps because Americans already have American-looking comics


Or by the time it came out here, people confused it with that Stallone movie with the same name. Laughing

Quote:
but it was very popular in France,


Apparently w/ Luc Besson, too. Cool

Quote:
I'd like to see that in a shonen manga nowadays, incidentally.


That Smoker guy in One Piece still smokes.
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Moomintroll



Joined: 08 Oct 2007
Posts: 1600
Location: Nottingham (UK)
PostPosted: Fri Nov 12, 2010 6:15 am Reply with quote
ptolemy18 wrote:
It's available for iPhone. Also, it was published by Viz, but the back issues might be impossible to find.


Cobra might be hard to come by (for those of us who don't use an iPhone and / or don't like reading off a screen) but the two series by the same artist that ComicsOne published - Goku Midnight Eye and Kabuto - can be picked up for next to nothing.
Mind you, Goku Midnight Eye is only somewhat entertaining in its awfulness(*) and Kabuto is just flat out terrible so I'm not exactly recommending anybody actually bother to do so...

[*: The thing about that series that most sticks in my mind is that one of the baddies rides a cyborg woman as a motorbike - she even has handlebars sticking out of here neck - which is kind of awesome in a disturbing kind of way. I mean, if you're going to be a misogynistic prick, you should at least be creative about it, right?]
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egoist



Joined: 20 Jun 2008
Posts: 7762
PostPosted: Fri Nov 12, 2010 8:13 am Reply with quote
I suppose I've found a new perfect flirting line.
"Hi, you have cool breasts... all those curves, and me with no brakes."
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simside



Joined: 07 May 2010
Posts: 29
PostPosted: Fri Nov 12, 2010 2:17 pm Reply with quote
At one point, Chicago's biggest Terasawa fan brought Cobra along with Midnight Eye Goku and Kabuto into my used book store, and I bought all three of them. The volume of Cobra was in Japanese, but I've stumbled across the Viz backissues before, and have several in English. Terasawa's pretty... amazing. I think the thing that sold me on Cobra was the hilarious James Bond-looking covers on the Shounen Jump re-issue volumes.

I had no idea Marv Wolfman did the re-writes on the Viz versions of Cobra. That's pretty interesting.

Also, I feel like I should argue about the connection between Cobra and Dorian Red (to me, he looks less shoujo and more like an 80s shounen character), but I think I would look like way too much of a geek. Also, I've probably forgotten what Dorian looked like in the 70s, since his modern shovel-faced look is all that's occurring to me at the moment.
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Paploo



Joined: 21 Nov 2006
Posts: 1875
PostPosted: Fri Nov 12, 2010 5:22 pm Reply with quote
I'm going to have to track down the VIZ back issues and the Urban Vision VHS [I do have some of Goku Midnight Eye though]- this looks like a fun series, and really well suited to domestic tastes. It's too bad more of it didn't make it's way over here, hopefully anime distributors'll at least give the most recent animated versions a spin sometime
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster


Joined: 07 May 2005
Posts: 357
Location: San Francisco
PostPosted: Fri Nov 12, 2010 9:00 pm Reply with quote
simside wrote:
Also, I feel like I should argue about the connection between Cobra and Dorian Red (to me, he looks less shoujo and more like an 80s shounen character), but I think I would look like way too much of a geek. Also, I've probably forgotten what Dorian looked like in the 70s, since his modern shovel-faced look is all that's occurring to me at the moment.


True, it is a questionable similarity. But he definitely has a Captain Harlock/shojo-sci-fi vibe in those flashbacks, before he turns into the biggest dork on the planet, like all popular shonen manga heroes from the '80s!
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Lord Geo



Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 2532
Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey
PostPosted: Sun Nov 14, 2010 9:09 am Reply with quote
The only bit of Cobra I'm familiar with are the recent OVAs, The Psychogun and Time Drive, but they were really good animes and they really got me liking Cobra as a character. He is goofy, but that's part of his charm. It's like how part of Ryo Saeba's charm is his never-ending stream of "mokkori".

It's a shame that we'll probably never get Cobra over here ever again on DVD or print. Apparently, the recent OVAs and TV series sport very high premium license prices, outside of streaming though, since Cobra is considered a cultural landmark in Japan or something to that extent.
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loempiavreter



Joined: 24 Jun 2007
Posts: 26
PostPosted: Sun Nov 14, 2010 10:39 am Reply with quote
Cobra is my favourite manga. Why? Simple entertaining pulp stories with creative world/setting and some really bizarre space pirates and other villains.

Cobra essentially feels and looks like a French comic (especially the color series) and with al sorts of references to france, like cobra's face who is an exact copy of JP Belmondo one of the coolest cat in nouvelle vague cinema, it's no wonder it's really popular in france!

Wish they still make 'em like this, the japanese comic output seem to worsen by the day (while there are still gems like Dorohedoro circeling around).
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GATSU



Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 15279
PostPosted: Sun Nov 14, 2010 5:08 pm Reply with quote
Geo: I doubt the fees are the issue as much as the lack of domestic demand for the series.
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