Knights Of The Zodiac (Saint Seiya), Volume 1 by Masami Kurumada (amazon)
Long long ago, when I was a wee lass in high school the only way I could watch anime was to go to the nearby university’s anime club. And there I saw a truly awesome show, filled with random references to astronomy, Greek mythology, and lots and lots of punching. It also had a hilarious Japanese pop metal opening song:
Sure, it probably looks primitive now, but in the late 1980s Saint Seiya was a pinnacle of awesomeness.
In the first volume of the manga, Seiya is a lone Japanese boy training in Sanctuary, a training ground for the warrior Knights of Athena. Seiya’s trainer is a masked woman named Marin. By defeating his rival Cassios in battle, Seiya obtains the Pegasus cloth, a type of armor that can protect its wearer and magnify his powers.
After lots of punching in Greece, Seiya returns home to Japan where the reader learns that a powerful family was recruiting one hundred orphans to fight in order to bring cloths back to Japan so a crazy tournament between knights can be staged. Seiya was one of those orphans, and only nine others survived. Now, they all get to fight each other!
Knights of the Zodiac is great because:
- Sometimes I get all nostalgic for chunky 80s manga art, where everyone had big eyebrows
- The Knights’ cosmic power gives them the ability to punch someone 100 times in one second. That’s a whole lotta punching!
- It has lines like “I sense a terrible Cosmo flooding this whole area” and “Taste my Pegasus Meteor Punches!”
Saint Seiya was featured as part of Shaenon’s Overlooked Manga Festival, so head on over there for some manga scans.