Captain Harlock (manga)

• 1. Introduction

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  Captain Harlock first appeared in the pages of Play Comic, a manga magazine published by Akita Shoten, in January 1977. Leiji Matsumoto wrote and drew every page of a story that would run until June 1979 and fill five collected volumes. The subject was deceptively simple: a man who had been cast out from his own civilization and chose to become a space pirate rather than accept its slow collapse. What made that premise last was the year in which the story is set: 2977 AD, a thousand years from now, when humanity has spread across the stars and then given up caring about them. The questions the series raises linger long after the last chapter. What does a person owe to a civilization that has stopped believing in itself? What do you do when your government ignores a threat until it is too late? And what kind of hero chooses to fight not for a nation or a flag, but against the very idea of surrender?

• 2. A Civilization Succumbing to Ennui

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  By the year 2977 AD, humanity commands a vast starfaring civilization, yet the source of its crisis is not conquest from without but collapse from within. Earth's people have fallen into apathy, a pervasive exhaustion that leaves the government unable or unwilling to respond to genuine threats. The Mazone, a race of intelligent plant-based beings in female humanoid form, explored Earth in the mythic past and are now returning to reclaim it as their own. They have destroyed their original home planet and need somewhere new to settle. Their corpses, when they die, spontaneously combust and burn to ash, leaving nothing behind. Only a handful of scientists saw the Mazone threat early enough to warn the government, and those scientists were killed for their trouble. Professor Tsuyoshi Daiba was one of them, an astronomer whose warnings went unheeded before he was murdered by the Mazone. His death would drive the series' most important recruitment.

• 3. The Crew of the Arcadia

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  Fourteen-year-old Tadashi Daiba joins the Arcadia in the immediate aftermath of his father's murder, motivated by grief and a desire for revenge. He lost his mother earlier, in a disaster on the Neptunian moon Triton, when her calls for help were simply ignored by the government. Tadashi is sometimes at odds with Harlock in the early episodes, but he grows into a trusted member of the senior staff as the series progresses. He serves as the audience's way into Harlock's world: young, angry, and still learning what the captain already knows about the cost of fighting. Kei Yuki, the Arcadia's chief navigator and science officer, had already earned her place before Tadashi arrived. Harlock first encountered her when he raided a ship that was carrying her back to Earth as a prisoner, her crime being that she had assaulted a military officer who had belittled her father's death. The first mate, Yattaran, is based on real manga artist Kaoru Shintani, best known for the manga Area 88, who worked for Matsumoto early in his career building scale models for reference. Yattaran shares that same hobby aboard the Arcadia, constructing plastic models of ships and even a scale replica of the Arcadia itself. Doctor Zero serves as the ship's chief medical officer and as comic relief, perpetually raiding the kitchen of Miss Masu for sake and quarreling with the cantankerous chief steward. His cat, Mi-kun, was originally a stray kitten whose injured mother carried it to Zero's office. Mi-kun later crossed over into other Matsumoto works, including Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999. The cat is based on Matsumoto's own pet, the current of which is named Mi-kun III. Perhaps the most unusual crew member is Miime, an alien from the planet Jura who is the last surviving member of her species, Harlock and crew having rescued her before her people perished. She has no mouth and communicates without speaking. She uses alcohol as a food source rather than an intoxicant, though extremely high-proof spirits can affect her. She plays a lap harp, whose strumming can calm pain and anxiety among the crew. The ship's chief builder, Tochiro Oyama, died of illness before the events of the series begin, but his consciousness survives inside the Arcadia's computer, making the ship itself a kind of memorial.

• 4. Harlock and His Enemies

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  Commander Kiruda leads Earth's defense forces and is Harlock's sworn enemy throughout the series. His backstory mirrors Harlock's in painful ways. He lost his father, a government secret agent, in a failed mission, and then lost his mother and his younger sister Tami. Blaming the government for those deaths, he climbed the military ranks intending to change it from within. Like Professor Daiba, he tried to warn the Earth government about the Mazone and was ignored. His path eventually curves away from pure antagonism: he sacrifices himself defending the Arcadia's main computer against Mazone soldiers, and throughout the series he maintains a quiet, protective concern for the child Mayu Oyama, even taking a scorpion sting to protect her. The Mazone queen, Rafflesia, is named after the Rafflesia genus of parasitic plants, sometimes called the Corpse Flower. She began as a wise and kind ruler but the desperation of her people hardened her. She initially did not view Harlock as a serious threat and even saved his life early in the series, a decision she would come to regret. A Mazone spy named Shizuka infiltrates the Earth government, posing as the Prime Minister's secretary, and when Harlock uncovers her identity he gives her asylum on the Arcadia rather than turning her over. When Queen Rafflesia later orders Shizuka killed, Shizuka forces Harlock to kill her himself rather than face death from her own people. Harlock tells Kiruda, who had feelings for Shizuka, that she died a hero in battle against the Mazone, never revealing what she was.

• 5. The Anime and Its Score

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  The 1978 anime adaptation was directed by Rintaro and produced by Toei Animation. Its symphonic score was performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic. Despite the space opera setting, the series used that backdrop to examine questions about the limits of violence as a solution and the inner lives of men in combat. Harlock himself is written with sympathy for the Mazone. He recognizes them as refugees from a dead world, not invaders driven by malice, and he takes no pleasure in fighting them. A subtitled version of the original series appeared as early as 1978 on KIKU, a Honolulu-based Japanese-language UHF station. KIKU-TV distributed the series to other Japanese-language broadcasters on the mainland the following year, with KEMO-TV in San Francisco airing it on Sunday nights at 8:00. Los Angeles and New York also carried it.

• 6. English Dubs and Repackaging

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  ZIV International produced English dubs of four episodes for limited American release in 1981, mostly on cable, with a VHS release through Family Home Entertainment. The first two episodes produced were numbers 1 and 9, and those appeared reasonably faithful to the source material. Episodes 2 and 3 received a far less serious treatment, and the name change that drew the most ridicule was Tadashi Daiba becoming Tommy Hairball. The Mazones were renamed the Zetons and Yattaran became Youngblood. The voice cast for episodes 1 and 9 did not match ZIV's usual roster, and when combined with abrupt video cuts and the existence of an English-language LP record, that led to speculation that those two episodes had actually been dubbed in Tokyo by Toei in an attempt to sell the series to English-speaking markets. In the early 1990s, Malibu Graphics acquired and redistributed those ZIV episodes, advertising them as never-before-seen and completely unedited. In reality the transfers were poorly mastered, with music drowning out dialogue and audio and video frequently falling out of sync. Harmony Gold USA, the company behind Robotech, dubbed the series again in 1985 under the title Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years. Needing the 65 or more episodes required for TV syndication, Harmony Gold spliced the Harlock series together with Matsumoto's Queen Millennia, intercutting whole scenes from each series within individual episodes. The Queen Millennia story never reached its original conclusion in this version, and plot points shifted from episode to episode without explanation. Despite sharing a title, the two lead characters never appear onscreen together. The version never saw wide North American release. In 2009, William Winckler Productions, whose producer was known for the English version of Tekkaman the Space Knight, assembled two film compilations from the original series, each running 105 minutes. These were available in Japan through the Toei Anime BB Premium broadband service.

• 7. Sequels and Continuing Lore

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  Discotek Media released the complete original series as a subtitled DVD boxset in North America on the 27th of August 2013. That same year brought an animated feature film adaptation, which depicted Miime with a more humanoid face that includes a visible mouth, a departure from her original alien design. In August 2014, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Matsumoto's debut as a creator, a new retelling manga launched under the title Captain Harlock: Dimensional Voyage, illustrated by Koichi Shimahoshi and featuring significant plot differences from the original. Seven Seas Entertainment holds the North American license for the original manga. A sequel comic written and drawn by Jerome Alquie, in collaboration with Matsumoto and published by Ablaze Comics, began publication in 2021. Emeraldas, a character introduced in this series as Tochiro's lover and the mother of Mayu, is identified as an early version of a character who would go on to play a larger role in Matsumoto's later works, suggesting that the Harlock universe was always intended as part of a broader, interlocking mythology. Shizuka, the Mazone spy who died aboard the Arcadia, reappears in the 2002 Endless Odyssey OVA as the holographic assistant of Professor Daiba, sporting dark hair instead of her original red, with the two versions explicitly treated as different characters.