is a Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 manga

Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...

 written and illustrated by Masaomi Kanzaki

Masaomi Kanzaki

is a Japanese manga artist. He has worked on titles such as Flag Fighters, Ironcat, Hagane, and Xenon. He is best known worldwide for his work on the Street Fighter II manga in the early 1990s.-External links:*...

. The manga was published in 1986 by Shogakukan

Shogakukan

is a Japanese publisher of dictionaries, literature, manga, non-fiction, DVDs, and other media in Japan.Shogakukan founded Shueisha which founded Hakusensha. These are three separate companies, but are together called the Hitotsubashi Group, one of the largest publishing groups in Japan...

 and 2000 by Kodansha

Kodansha

, the largest Japanese publisher, produces the manga magazines Nakayoshi, Afternoon, Evening, and Weekly Shonen Magazine, as well as more literary magazines such as Gunzō, Shūkan Gendai, and the Japanese dictionary Nihongo Daijiten. The company has its headquarters in Bunkyō, Tokyo...

. It was serialised in seinen

Seinen

is a subset of manga that is generally targeted at a 20–30 year old male audience, but the audience can be older with some manga aimed at businessmen well into their 40s. In Japanese, the word Seinen means "young man" or "young men" and is not suggestive of sexual matters...

 magazine Monthly Comic Ryū

Monthly Comic Ryu

is a Japanese monthly seinen manga and anime magazine published by Tokuma Shoten. The magazine was originally a quarterly special issue of Animage, beginning in 1979 before switching to a monthly schedule and finally suspending publication...

. The manga was licensed by Eclipse Comics

Eclipse Comics

Eclipse Comics was an American comic book publisher, one of several independent publishers during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1978, it published the first graphic novel intended for the newly created comic book specialty store market...

 in 1987 and by Viz Communications in 1992. The manga is licensed for a French-language release in France by Génération Comics and Semic, licensed for a German-language release in Germany by Planet Manga, and licensed in Taiwan by Taiwan Tohan.

Manga

Kodansha

Kodansha

, the largest Japanese publisher, produces the manga magazines Nakayoshi, Afternoon, Evening, and Weekly Shonen Magazine, as well as more literary magazines such as Gunzō, Shūkan Gendai, and the Japanese dictionary Nihongo Daijiten. The company has its headquarters in Bunkyō, Tokyo...

 published the manga's 4 bound volumes

Tankobon

, with a literal meaning close to "independently appearing book", is the Japanese term for a book that is complete in itself and is not part of a series , though the manga industry uses it for volumes which may be in a series...

between March 1986 and March 1987.

Reception

The French Manga-News regarded the first volume as "a good action manga if you like the author or the genre, but dispensable for others". While praising the art, the Manga-News reviewer felt the story was unoriginal. He felt that the "non-stop action" prevented the series from sinking into caricatures, and noted that the fanbase of the manga kept the manga going into a fourth volume, and found the last volume "most interesting".