Title : Harlock: My Youth in Arcadia RA# : Extra 52 Pub/Date : Tokuma Shoten/1982 Pages : 152 Price : 890 yen
Glossy colour cine digest; colour stills; rough and final designs for characters, mechanics, and scenes; production drawings; staff and cast interviews.
Double-sided pin-up poster
Covers the story of the Captain Harlock movie My Youth in Arcadia in its entirety in digest form, and includes an extra colour section showing characters and mechanics.
This is the first of the Harlock stories. It is sometime before the 2970s, and Earth has been occupied by the Ilmeidas Empire, a race of green-skinned people whose physical characteristics are identical to those of the Comet Imperials in the Yamato saga. Earth is forming a resistance force, and free space trader Harlock joins forces with a band of others in an effort to drive off the Ilmeidas. They launch in the secretly constructed space battleship, the Arcadia.
Yeah, there's a lot more to this story than I am going to tell here. Lots of Matsumotoian angst. Great story.
The Harlock saga is connected directly to Galaxy Express 999 and Adieu GE 999, and indirectly to Queen Millenia. Early comic strips by Reiji Matsumoto also placed a connexion to the Yamato story. However, when Nishizaki adapted Matsumoto's comics into the Yamato TV series, this connection was left out.