Tsukasa Hojo’s City Hunter is a foundational work for me, both in terms of my fandom and as a chief influence on my artistic taste and my style. It was one of the first shows I latched onto as a kid who had just moved to Japan looking for cool cartoons to watch. And man, was it cool - cool contemporary setting, cool music, cool “realistic” action, beautifully drawn women, and the coolest protagonist (when he wasn’t being a pervert - it was the 80s). It was utterly unlike any of the cartoons I watched back in the US and it made me feel like a whole new world of animation for adults had opened up to me. Little did pre-teen me know at the time, but it originated in Shonen Jump which was targeted at kids exactly my age.
I caught the new Netflix live-action adaption of City Hunter over the weekend and as a fan, I was really impressed by how it captured the spirit of the source material. Ryohei Suzuki was pitch perfect as Ryo, able to shift from sharp, cool operator to goofy lecher in the blink of an eye. Misato Morita was also great as Kaori. The plot was fairly goofy, but that’s also very City Hunter. Not a flawless movie but I had a lot of fun with it and I hope it’s successful enough to become a series.
I was still thinking about it the next day when I started drawing this little tribute piece of Ryohei Suzuki as Ryo Saeba.
... and a time lapse: