Studio Cutie

The sequel to the classic manga Gunsmith Cats!

Rally’s still catching crooks, while Bean transports them--but now Bean’s greatest enemy is on his case: obsessed cop Percy Bacharach!

Rally Vincent runs Gunsmith Cats--a gun shop in Illinois with her partner, demolitions expert and former call girl Minnie-May Hopkins. But Rally’s ＂real＂ job doesn’t pay the bills, her hobby does. And her hobby is bounty hunting, bringing the most wanted men and women in the Chicago area to justice--dressed in her sharp suit and tie, and driving her Shelby Cobra GT 500!

In Gunsmith Cats Burst Omnibus Volume 1, Rally and ace transporter Bean Bandit find themselves well outside city limits--and deep in the heart of Texas! After Bean’s own vehicle is swiped, Rally hires Bean to get her and her bounty back all the way back to Chicago in a rental car...except it turns out it only had half a tank, and pretty soon Bean’s got to push! The desperate situation turns still more dire when they seek sanctuary at a remote motel far off the interstate, and some Mob hitmen on their trail check in...but this is the Wild West, and the Monroe Inn is run by an old-fashioned grandma who packs a Winchester rifle!

Meanwhile, there’s a new cop in Chicago who’s from some even harder streets--the mustachioed, Mustang Mach 1-driving Inspector Percy Bacharach, late of the Detroit P.D. It seems Bean Bandit’s wrecked a few too many squad cars in the Motor City, so Percy’s transferred to Chicagoland to pursue Bean. But he’s not interested in arresting him. Instead he’s going to find a legal--or maybe not-so-legal--excuse to take Bean out in a duel to the death on the highway!

The Gunsmith Cats Burst Omnibus is using the 2000s unflopped version of the manga, so that it reads in the original Japanese style, from right to left.

For mature audiences.

Collects Gunsmith Cats: Burst chapters 1-22.

Kenichi Sonoda is an iconic artist of the retro anime aesthetic. He was the character designer for the classic 1980s cyberpunk saga Bubblegum Crisis, and in the 1990s for Otaku no Video, the anime from legendary studio Gainax (Neon Genesis Evangelion) that popularized the term ＂otaku.＂ In 2024, Kenichi Sonoda was given the prestigious Inkpot Award at San Diego Comic-Con.

Gunsmith Cats is Sonoda’s longest manga series, making its original 1991 debut in Kodansha’s Afternoon magazine, home of such stories as Vinland Saga, Blade of the Immortal, Oh My Goddess! and Wandering Island.

Kenichi Sonoda traces his roots to Kumamoto, Japan, where in recent years he has become the 19th family head of his ancestral wagashi (traditional Japanese confectionery) shop, founded in 1582--for which Sonoda now designs character mascots!