Cosmoship Yamato

During production of the first TV series, Leiji Matsumoto would then return to his own drawing board every night to render the same story in manga form for Adventure King magazine.

Matching the publication timing of Matsumoto's manga to the airing of the TV episodes reveals much about the creative decisions he made to keep both versions concurrent; they started and ended almost simultaneously, running from early October 1974 to late March 1975.

One of the best-known casualties of the reduced episode count of the anime series was the appearance of Matsumoto's Captain Harlock as a supporting character. Although Harlock's story was cut from the anime altogether, he could still play a part in the manga version...though by this time it was clear that Matsumoto intended the Yamato Harlock to have no relationship to the Space Pirate Harlock, who would later experience a successful manga & anime career of his own.

Akita Shoten's first paperback collection of Leiji Matsumoto's Cosmoship Yamato was published three months later (July 20, 1975) and exactly followed the fate of the anime series, gathering a much wider audience as time went on and going back to print dozens of times to meet the demand. The next year of Matsumoto's manga career was dominated by his classic World War II series, The Cockpit. But he would return to Space Battleship Yamato briefly in 1976 to create a new story that would continually surprise people more than thirty years later.