More Netflix anime licensing news today! The April 2019 issue of Shogakukan’s Monthly Shonen Sunday has announced that Hiroshi Takashige and Ryouji Minagawa’s classic sci-fi manga Spriggan is getting an anime adaptation, which will be released worldwide by Netflix. Animation will be handled by David Production, the studio known for animating JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Cells at Work, among others.
Other details such as the release date, number of episodes, and voice actors are yet to be announced.
Spriggan is set in the Cold War era, where world superpowers are fighting over mysterious items known as out-of-place artifacts (OOPart), which can be used by the superpowers as weapons against one another. The story focuses on Yu Ominae, one of the top agents or “Spriggan” of the ARCAM Private Army. They are the military arm of the ARCAM Corporation, a multi-national company that has taken upon itself the job of protecting these artifacts from an ancient civilization against the countries who intend to use these in their wars.
Written by Hiroshi Takashige and illustrated by Ryouji Minagawa, Spriggan ran from 1989 to 1996 in Shogakukan’s Weekly Shonen Sunday and Shonen Sunday Super. It has since released 11 tankobon volumes from 1991 to 1996, and reprints in 2001 and 2006 included previously unpublished stories “First Mission” and “Gold Rush”. Viz Media translated and released three out of the manga’s eleven volumes and renamed it Striker, but eventually halted publication and distribution of the manga in North America.
The manga was also adapted by Studio 4°C into an anime film in 1998, which covered the Noah’s Ark story of the manga.
Source: Anime News Network, Crunchyroll