Votoms manga by Yu Okazaki, 1983-84
Yu Okazaki is one of those manga workhorses whose name didn’t travel far outside of Japan, though his credits include a great many recognizable titles: Cutie Honey, Grendaizer, Daitarn 3, Dougram, and one of the first manga versions of Mobile Suit Gundam, for a start. These were adapted from anime, but he was also known for original stories as well. Joining Go Nagai’s famous Dynamic Pro studio after graduating from high school put him on a career track that kept him going non-stop until he retired in the 1990s. But from 1983 to 84, he crossed paths with Armored Trooper Votoms.
His adaptation ran at the exact same time as Minoru Nonaka’s version in Kadokawa’s Comic BomBom magazine, but Okazaki worked for Akita Shoten’s TV Anime Magazine. These “rival” publications shared the mission of turning as many anime titles as possible into manga for young readers.
Okazaki’s version of Votoms premiered in the May 1983 issue (sold in April) and lasted 12 months, keeping pace with the TV series and wrapping up in the April 1984 issue (sold in March). During that time, it shared space with manga versions of Dunbine, Macross, Urashiman, Mospeada, Vifam, L-Gaim, and various others including some live action tokusatsu-based strips. The fact that Comic BomBom carried their own versions of some of these same titles tells you what a wild time it was for manga based on anime. Nobody was worried about exclusives; they just wanted to get as many readers as possible to watch the shows.
The most significant difference between the two Votoms adaptations was their page count. Okazaki’s chapters were much shorter (averaging just 8 pages), which turned his version into a highly-compressed montage for the most part. But he still managed to tell the entire story in just over 100 pages, which was an incredible feat of editing. Woodo got the most pages (4 chapters), but Kummen and Sunsa only got 3 chapters apiece, and Quent only required two; 13 episodes of story condensed into a mere 18 pages. It was published just under a month before the anime series ended on TV.
TV Anime Magazine folded shorter afterward, and this manga languished in obscurity until it was finally revived in 2011 for a paperback collection from Manga Shop that paired it with Okazaki’s Dougram manga from Comic BomBom. All the pages below appeared in that book.
Read a dual interview with Yu Okazaki and Minoru Nonaka here.
Red lines indicate chapter breaks.
