Ask John: What is Golgo 13?

Question:
I recently heard about an anime called Golgo 13- mixed responses regarding it. Some say it’s good; others say it’s kinda cheesy. My friend that dislikes the anime very much says that the manga series is fantastic. I know there was a movie called The Professional, but how many movies of Golgo are there? IS the manga available either in English or Japanese to the US public?

Answer:
Takao Saito’s ruthlessly efficient and coldly expressionless professional assassin Golgo 13 first premiered in a manga story published by Big Comic in 1969. Saito has been writing and drawing the Golgo 13 manga non-stop ever since, making it one of Japan’s most popular comic series. Collected tankouban manga volume 123 was just released in Japan on January 5, 2002. For being such a popular manga serial, though, there have been relatively few screen adaptations. Veteran Japanese character actor Ken Takakura first portrayed Duke Togo, more commonly known as Golgo 13, in a movie of the same name released in 1973. Sonny Chiba then took over the role of Golgo 13 in the 1977 Japanese film known as Golgo 13: The Kowloon Assignment. In 1983 Osamu Dezaki directed a feature length Golgo 13 anime film, loved by some for its characteristic 80s anime emphasis on style over substance or story, and hated by others for its somewhat odd looking character designs, use of (by contemporary standards) primitive CG, which was at the time ground breaking, and its unintentionally campy ultra-serious and hard boiled tone. While this film was simply titled “Golgo 13” in Japan, the American Streamline Pictures, with its virtual policy of making changes to its anime translations, added the subtitle “The Professional.” In 1998 Dezaki again brought G13 to anime in Golgo 13: Queen Bee, a self-contained OAV that was intended to be the beginning of a new franchise of G13 OAVs. In an attempt to present a different perspective on the now 30 year old character, the Queen Bee OAV was written around Golgo 13 instead of making Golgo himself the focal character. The experiment did not go over well with Japanese audiences and plans for more episodes were scrapped.

In 1986, a year before First Comics began translating Lone Wolf & Cub and Viz Communications premiered Xenon, Mai and Kamui in America, Lead Publishing in association with Shogakukan published four 160+ page domestic English translated Golgo 13 graphic novels complete with slipcovers and footnotes in the translations to explain political and geographical references. These books have been out of print for years but can sometimes be found at comic book stores or conventions at very reasonable prices, sometimes in fact for even less than their original $8 cover price. As for the odds of a new translation of the manga sometime in the future, according to Toren Smith of Studio Proteus, “Golgo 13 is a great series but really doesn’t fit into the market we have here [in America] for manga (and comics in general). The art style is a big problem.”

AnimeNation can import any of the Japanese G13 manga by special order request.