3 out of 5

The furthest I’ve traveled back in time for manga has been Berserk, the first chapters of which are 1989. Anime, I started Lupin from the top, which is 1971… but just as watching American cartoons from the 70s differs from 70s comic books, I can’t equate one format exactly to the other, except in how some cultural norms get represented. So I’m leaving some wiggle room when reading this late 1970s material from Leiji Matsumoto: the art, its pacing, the storytelling… are off, which I’ll discuss, with this carved-out caveat that I really don’t know what I’m talking about.

Space opera is not my bag, but that genre is flexible: arguably Star Trek and The Expanse are space operas of varying stripes, and though Harlock is a bit soapier than I’d prefer – at least, as translated – the tone is adjacent enough to the dramatics of, say, the aforementioned Lupin or even things I was watching as a kid that were arguably tenuously connected, like Voltron. And I think Harlock isn’t so much operatic as whimsical: its boys adventure vibes of proclaiming the gloriousness of being a space pirate, and pausing for tearful asides about long lost friends, and the kind of fitful anti-authoritarian-but-I’m-in-this-for-the-good-of-the-people “motivations” of our Captain and our POV character, Daiba all fit within the bubble of spirited playacting that made for a lot of great 70s / 80s media, but the overwrought dramatics of it all do produce the soapy-type bubbles as well.

This collection contains the first 16 chapters of our story, plus a bonus – which I believe is a flashback from the context – that was originally published in a 1975 compilation book called ‘Tales of a Time Gone By’. Matsumoto’s way into the story of Harlock is interesting, and one of the more compelling aspects of the setup – though, like most of the plot points in this set, remains very surface level: we start, basically, by establishing that the Earth of the future sucks, and its leadership is incompetent. While that may seem like pretty standard “commentary” nowadays, it’s Matsumoto really underplaying the crashlanding of an ominous black sphere upon the planet’s surface, something that, in more typical tales, would be treated with pages of intrigue and militarly scrabbling and so on. Here, the President can hardly be woken up from a nap to tell everyone to not worry about it. The scientist trying to alert the President – y’know, that this foreign object wedged into our planet might need some attention- is a Professor Daiba, who is soon killed by a member of the “Mazon” (the eventual antagonists and aliens likely responsible for the sphere) in a clunkily scripted moment that is not tonally separated from the political foibles that preceded it, screwing up how much focus we’re intended to give it. Famed pirate Captain Harlock then intervenes to save Daiba’s son, Tadashi, from the same fate, which, over a couple of chapters, give us the framing of Harlock and Tadashi flitting back and forth from planets to Earth, trying to untangle the mysterious origins of the Mazons.

The clunky scripting carries over throughout: mixing drama and comedy in manga is not a surprise, but it’s never clear (again, taking into account some potential translation woes) how seriously we’re supposed to be taking any given revelation, especially given the way Matsumoto scripts it in a kind of seat-of-the-pants manner that acts like a twist, but sniffs suspiciously of being made up just to fill a chapter with something to do. And thus the series really wanders, and suffers from repetition of the same revelation, or slight variation on it; back and forth to a random destination, fight a Mazon, then back to Earth. The geography of Harlock’s ship is never really clear, which is a big problem, and the exact purpose of bringing Daiba on board is also never clear; speaking of which, nor is it ever really clear what makes Harlock such a big deal, besides owning a big ship, having a badass eyepatch, and a cool cloak.

Which takes us back to the big positive of the story, though, which is the overall vibe. The aforementioned boys adventureness of it gets mixed with some compelling – if, again, not deeply explored – mystery elements, and even if repeated again and again, the oddity of the Mazons’ nature and origin is great story fodder; I imagine reading this in separate chapters and not collected could’ve allowed my imagination to fill in story blanks in the downtime between entries. And Harlock’s design and his ship’s juggernaut nature is very badass.

The art, meanwhile, is a mixed bag. I dig how stylized Matsumoto can be, jumping between absurdly cartoonish cast members (the President, much of the ship’s crew) and the lithe figurework of Harlock, and Daiba, and the Mazons. And then the relative intricacy of the ship designs and just the scope of some of the ideas are conceptually cool, though we hit limits on those: the ship itself feels inconsistent, action sequences also lack a sense of space and place, and the “scope” sometimes just makes it to a sketch level, and drops the details. It is, like the story itself, operating very much on vibes, with Leiji foregoing visual clarity necessarily if he gets the feeling right. And I’d say he does, but it undermines the potential of the book / story to feel more substantial.

Captain Harlock has been on my watch list for a while, and I’m glad Seven Seas’ collections are giving me a chance to peek at the story first. But it’s a negative use case: I suspect the anime will hold my interest more, as the manga is a bit too rough and undefined to convince me to keep going. Its vibes are perfect, though, slotting right in to classic sci-fi romps from the same 70s/80s era, and giving it some leeway for the time in which it was published lands it right about the so-so level as a modern day reading experience.