Cowboy Bebop: The 7 Best Manga To Read After You’ve Watched The Netflix Series

Cowboy Bebop is the rare kind of anime series that wouldn’t work well as a manga, so it’s no surprise that it was never adapted for the page. With its signature fluid animation style and the significant role that music plays in the show, a manga would ultimately lack some of the fundamental elements that make Bebop so entertaining.

However, manga readers looking to experience something similar to Bebop are not out of luck. While nothing exactly like Cowboy Bebop exists in any medium, there are plenty of manga series that features some of what fans love about it. Whether readers are looking for existentialist sci-fi stories or episodic character-driven adventures, these manga all have something to appeal to Bebop fans.

Chainsaw Man

Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man is a comparatively short series, running from 2018 to 2020 in a tidy 11 volumes packed with action, dark humor, and plenty of graphic, gory violence. The story revolves around Denji, a young man who becomes permanently bonded to his pet chainsaw devil (resulting in him gaining the eponymous “Chainsaw Man” form) and is then recruited by the Public Safety Division to kill dangerous devils with his new abilities.

Fujimoto’s celebrated manga is as strange as it is engaging, and Bebop fans will appreciate its similar brand of humor and Chainsaw Man‘s cast of interesting characters–ranging from Power, a fellow Hunter, and Blood Fiend, to Beam, Denji’s Shark Fiend partner. The dynamic art style is especially worth seeing, lovingly depicting Denji’s chainsaw head ripping devils to pieces in all of the detail it deserves.

Blame!

Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! is a cyberpunk action series with an absolutely stunning art style, dark and striking and packed with detail–perfectly reflecting the anxious, claustrophobia of the story with how shadows and shapes crowd the pages. Blame! has been animated twice and neither adaptation has held a candle to the manga’s art, making it a series where the manga is absolutely the preferred medium.

Besides its incredible style, Blame! has a story as dense as its art–complicated and dark and necessitating a lot of close attention. Loosely, it follows a man named Killy wandering a hyper-digital landscape called “The City” in search of something that will give him access to the “Netsphere.” The plot is not easily condensed and is certainly not for everyone, but Bebop fans looking for a series that leans more heavily into action and cyberpunk while still maintaining the existentialist threads would do well with giving it a try.

Dorohedoro

Q Hayashida’s tragically underrated Dorohedoro (which also got a Netflix anime adaption) is a strange, deeply unique, and thrilling dark fantasy series which, at its simplest, is about Caimen, an amnesiac, and his quest to find his real identity after he wakes up with no memories and a lizard head. A vivid, extremely well-developed world of magic, class politics, vigilantism, and violence, trying to summarize the story does it no justice–especially since it’s difficult to separate Dorohedoro from the art style that’s just as much of a character as Caimen.

Hayashida’s world is well-realized and engaging, making every further development or piece of world-building especially gratifying. But the real success of the world is the perfect background it provides for Dorohedoro’s incredible cast of characters. Both Caimen and his underground allies and their rivals, the Enforcers, are written so well that it’s often hard to decide who to side with in their cat-and-mouse game. The series offers a great balance of mystery, humor, and action, and readers with a stomach for splashy gore won’t regret picking up Dorohedoro.

GANGSTA.

GANGSTA. is an ongoing crime manga by Kosuke centering Worick Arcangelo and Nicolas Brown, two men who work as “Handymen” in their deeply corrupt and crime-filled town, taking law enforcement jobs that other people aren’t capable of handling. The story skews more supernatural than Bebop, featuring people who have gained superhuman abilities from an experimental drug, but the themes of addiction and abuse handled within the story are very much grounded in reality.

GANGSTA. is particularly notable for its honest portrayal of people living in bleak circumstances, pointedly focusing on the realities of people who live in a society hostile to them and the ways they have to grow and change in order to survive. The combination of crime drama and psychological exploration holds a lot of similarities to Bebop, but the emphasis on the main characters and their relationship within these circumstances is ultimately what makes it appeal most to Bebop fans.

Queen Emeraldas

Queen Emeraldas is a short manga belonging to Leiji Matsumoto’s Harlock series, a classic space opera anime franchise. Emeraldas stands mostly independent, although the Galaxy Express 999 film does provide some background to the story, and doesn’t require much knowledge of Harlock to be enjoyed. And while Harlock as a whole generally tends towards the “Space Pirate” genre, Emeraldas is a space western story.

Staring pirate queen Emeraldas, a character seen occasionally in the Harlock franchise, the manga follows her journey across space and her interactions with a kid named Hiroshi, a goofy but determined space traveler. At one point they end up on a planet straight out of a western, saloons and all, and the setting contrasts well with the story’s question about Emeraldas’s dispensation of justice by her own terms.

Dimension W

Dimension W is a cyberpunk manga by Yuji Iwahara which ran from 2011 to 2015. The series followed a mechanic named Kyoma Mabuchi and Mira Yurizaki, a robot girl, who work as bounty hunters sent to collect powerful technological devices called “Coils.” Their search for Coils eventually leads to an overarching plot regarding energy crises and corporate corruption, while also exploring the developing friendship between the pair and their own personal character arcs.

As another story about emotionally stunted bounty hunters, Dimension W has a lot of obvious appeal for those looking for stories like Bebop. However, it leans much harder into sci-fi, especially as it primarily concerns exploring alternative methods of energy production through theoretically realistic circumstances. While this could be potentially overwhelming, Dimension W excels at its world-building, depicting its future in ways that feel believable, easily comprehensible, and worthy of comparison to cyberpunk anime classics such as Akira and Metropolis.

Desert Punk

Masatoshi Usune’s Desert Punk ended its 139-chapter run in 2020, finally bringing the tale of Kanta Mizuno and Taiko Koizumi’s post-apocalyptic desert adventures to a close. Desert Punk explores, like many post-apocalyptic stories, the rebuilding of society and the moral dilemmas and concessions that come after a disaster. Much of the story revolves around the protagonists taking mercenary work and traveling the desert, reflecting the basic Bebop structure.

Desert Punk‘s more salient similarities to Bebop lie in the exploration of morality throughout the series, and particularly how this can lapse into dark (and occasionally pretty morbid) humor. Desert Punk will appeal most to fans looking for a long series with a kind of similar ‘episodic’ structure revolving around exploration, morality, and human relationships.

About The Author