Give me pulp cowboy-mafia fiction, but make it sci fi - thanks! You would think that, considering my tastes, there’s no way that I would be into the ridiculous mash-up of genres that is Cowboy Bebop, but somehow I can’t get enough of Spike Spiegel and his motley crew of space age bounty hunters! Sean Cummings went a little bit off book with this story, since it is far removed from the original manga/anime storylines, and takes us back to a time before Spike was the man we know. In this story, we see him during his era as Fearless, cleaner/gopher for the Red Dragon Cartel and partner in arms to Vicious, his later rival. It’s definitely a bit weird to see the two men as comrades, but Cummings does a decent job of painting a gritty but brilliant picture of their time in the slums of Mars as low level mafiosos. Considering that we don’t get a lot of their backstory in any of the original Cowboy Bebop, it was fun to see a base storyarc building towards the events of the Netflix live action series that seemed pretty plausible. Cummings stayed on brand with an action-packed storyline, fight scenes that skewed towards the ridiculous, and a well-balanced blend of high- and low-tech – all of which continues to make the franchise so unique and appealing. Even if his writing was a little scripted and camp, it’s an easy thing to forgive within the Cowboy Bebop universe, since high brow style writing would seem out of place, and we are looking instead towards driving storylines and light character development for our kicks. It’s too bad that the Netflix series that got this book published tanked with viewers, and this ended up being the only associated novelization, since I actually quite enjoyed the easy action of the story and revisiting one of my favourite anime settings. Until they decide to remake it again I guess this is it… see you, Space Cowboy! ( )

Fantastic read. I want more Cowboy Bebop novels. ( )