Comic Review (and Appeal): Hyper Police

Although the furry genre is my particular favourite in terms of animation and comics, my animated tastes do flow into other genres, such as manga. So, I thought it was best to give a review on a furry manga.

My taste for this genre started when I began my course in media studies and I decided to explore different genres of television. Then last year I joined the University of Teesside’s Animation and Comics Society (Anicom), the birthplace of the Avatar “Bender” gag. How come no-one had noticed the incredibly gigantic amount of homosexual double-entrée in a cartoon in which everyone was some kind of “Bender” during its producer, I will probably never know. Anyway, I have been reading manga books as well as furry ones as well. Therefore, finding a furry manga would be of immediate interest. Hyper Police, created by Minoru Tachikawa (under the pseudonym “MEE”), is such a manga.

If you were to look for the books (of which there are 10 volumes), you will noticed that the main character is a catgirl. Now, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that a catgirl is not strictly speaking a furry. Well, that may well be the case. However, there are four main recurring characters, one of which is an anthropomorphic wolf, which is furry.

Hyper Police is a mixture of sci-fi, comedy and action. It is set in a period in the future in which humans are in danger of extinction, after a portal between the human world and a “Monster” world opened. As a result, the most populous creatures are crosses between the two. The manga focuses on the relationships between four employees of a privatised police force: catgirl Natsuki Sasahara, kitsune (fox spirit) Sakura Bokuseiinmonzeninari, werewolf Batanen Fujioka and his more anthropomorphic cousin Tomy Fujioka.

Natsuki, the main character in the strip is highly loveable. She is fun, cute and highly amusing. While she always means to do what is right, she more often than not often causes total chaos. However, it is total chaos which got her a job in the first place, due to her pet parasites being able to create massive electric shocks. This attracts Batanen’s affections – both professional and romantic.

The comedy in this strip mainly comes in two ways. One is the amusing missions that the four officers find themselves in. My personal favourite occurs quite late in the story (Volumes 7 and 8), in which a gang of mice who Natsuki had unwittingly harmed take revenge by building a robot version of her and go on a crime spree, while framing the catgirl. The whole sequence and situation is highly amusing.

The other way in which this series gets its laughs is the relationships that the characters have. Batanen is deeply in love with Natsuki, Tomy is in love with Poe, a human who can manipulate water, and Sakura falls in love with a time-travelling samurai.

The series was popular in Japan, with it being turned into a TV series. The series covers the storyline between volumes 1-4, and contains some differences from the original manga. Interestingly, the series was translated into Spanish before it got translated in English. The series was shown in the United States but has never been broadcast in the UK. It is not even on DVD in Europe, which is where the “Appeal” part of the article’s title comes in.

I want to try to get the TV series of Hyper Police released in the UK, and for that matter the rest of Europe, using the power of the internet. I have set up an online petition asking for the company behind the series, Studio Pierrot, to release the series in this continent. This can be done easily. The series has already been translated into two European languages, and Japan shares the same DVD region code as Europe. Of course, you could sell the DVD as “Region 0”, and therefore anyone around the world can buy the DVD.

I also plan to use the one thing that gets internet attention: Internet memes. I plan to launch an amusing campaign in order to get my message across called, “HP DVD or I bust thee!”

I release that my artistic attempts leave a lot to be desired, but I’m sure the more people we get involved, the more this whole thing will pick up.

What I want you to do is to please sign my petition, and to spread my meme as widely as possible. Go to as many websites you find, whether they are furry, animé, TV or anyone who might be interested. Spread the meme. Link to the petition or to this article. Try and appeal to everyone and anyone.

If you want to have some idea of how many people we would need to get this DVD released, a similar online petition to get the first series of QI released on DVD attracted 1,821 signatures and was successful.

So please, help us (especially me) and the rest of Europe to help get this DVD out of here. Sign the petition now!

Hyper Police is published in 10 volumes by Tokyopop, but is soon going out of print, so be quick! The TV Series is on Region 1 DVDs, so you can watch it on a region-free DVD player.