Gunsmith Cats

Gunsmith Cats ( Jap. ガンスミスキャッツ gansumisu kyattsu ;. V . English gunsmith cats , Gunsmith Cats') is a closed manga series of Japanese cartoonist Sonoda Kenichi , which from 1991 to 1997 in Japan in the Afternoon magazine of Kodansha published -Verlages . It was also implemented as a short anime series, which, however, uses a story not borrowed from the manga.

action

The action takes place in a not exactly definable period of time in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Rally Vincent lives in Chicago and works as a bounty hunter and bodyguard . She also runs a small gun shop called Gunsmith Cats , but she cannot and does not want to live on it. Rally is fond of weapons, which for them are an expression of their independence. As an arms dealer, she also pays attention to dubious people interested in weapons and places great importance on protecting bystanders. Rally's second passion is fast cars, especially their tuned Shelby Mustang GT500 and (in Gunsmith Cats: Burst ) a Mustang Mach 1 .

Rally's roommate and business partner is childlike "Minnie" May Hopkins . May is 2 years younger than Rally, but has already had an eventful life. As a child she ran away from her parents' house into the street, where she met her future lover and husband, Ken Takizawa , an explosives expert, who taught her everything there was to know in this subject; later she worked at the Purple Pussy brothel - a point in her past that she would rather leave behind. Just as Rally is crazy about guns, May is obsessed with explosive weapons and always carries a supply of explosives with him just in case.

Rally also meets Bean Bandit , a drug courier and getaway driver. One of the reasons Bean is successful is because he has sheer superhuman strength and can therefore afford to wear heavily armored clothing that a normal person could never put on. Bean basically does not think about the illegal business of his clients - he takes on the orders because otherwise they would be carried out by others and he could no longer finance his hobbies (including the design and construction of his own customized car). But it also has its good points: He fulfills his promises, personally or privately, extremely reliably (and if a business partner on his part fails to keep an agreement, he is "warned" in a tangible way by Bean), and he has in spite of him Loner nature a big heart for children. Rally and Bean are opponents at first, but later they help each other.

Becky Farrah is responsible for gathering information . She is greedy and always asks the fee first before offering reliable information. Misty Brown , a petty criminal and burglar, occasionally helps Rally and May out with smaller jobs, but often gets into trouble. Last but not least, Rally has excellent relations with the police, especially Detective Roy Coleman . Thanks to Roy, minor offenses that occur in the course of their activities do not lead to legal consequences.

Rally has to do with many criminals - but her main rival is Gordi, an ominous drug dealer with roots in the Italian mafia. Gordi brings the synthetic drug kerosene she developed onto the market, which immediately makes addicts and also enables psychological control over the addict.

Anime

The anime was released in 1995 as a three-part OVA under the title Gunsmith Cats in Japan. The original story as well as the character design are from Kenichi Sonoda .

Publications

In Germany, the series was published by Feest / Ehapa from 1995 . The original was the first US version of Dark Horse Comics . The series was therefore not published in the original format in German-speaking countries, but mirrored in an almost DIN A4 format, laid out in 19 volumes, whereby a bonus story was not printed and a page with clearly sexual content was removed. Since the reflection is no longer perceived as being up-to-date and the print quality has suffered from the strong stretching, the series was reissued in four volumes from January 2007, also because the original edition is considered out of print. Criticism of the new edition is the massive soundwords that cover up many details of the images and a very mild translation that is partially wrong in terms of content or context (the US new edition uses the Japanese soundwords and the original translation).

A sequel to the series has been appearing in Japan since 2004 under the name Gunsmith Cats: Burst , which is also published in Afternoon magazine.