Kerberos Panzer Cop, also known as , and as Hellhounds: Panzer Cops or just Hellhounds overseas, is an alternate history political thriller manga written by Mamoru Oshii and illustrated by Kamui Fujiwara (Studio 2B) with mechanical designs by Yutaka Izubuchi, running from 1988 to January 2000. Part of the Kerberos Saga and set before Oshii's 1987 film The Red Spectacles, the manga details the history and events surrounding the Special Armed Garrison, nicknamed "Kerberos", a Tokyo-based counterterrorist police tactical unit operating in an alternate history authoritarian postwar Japan.
Part I (Act 1~4) of Kerberos Panzer Cop was published in various Japanese comic magazines from 1988 to 1990, it was later completed with Part II (Act 5~8) published in Monthly Shōnen Ace from 1999 to 2000. Translated versions of the complete series were issued in South Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia and Taiwan in the early 2000s. An English language adaptation of the first four acts was published under the title Hellhounds: Panzer Cops in 1994 by Dark Horse Comics. The American translators from Studio Protheus, Alan Gleason and Toren Smith, randomly used the alternative titles Hellhounds (Cerberos: Panzer Cop) and Hellhounds. This adaptation was later issued in the United Kingdom by Diamond Comic Distributors in 1998, and a translated version was published in the German magazine in 1996.
In 2009, an omake-style issue, Kerberos Panzer Cop: Special Issue (前夜-ケルベロス騒乱異聞, zenya - keruberosu souran ibun), was published in Kerberos Panzer Cops: Tokyo War, the Kerberos Saga's definitive guide. In April 2010, for the 20th anniversary of the Original Edition (1990 volume compilation), publisher Gakken issued Kerberos Panzer Cop a Revision: 20th edition (犬狼伝説 20周年エディション), a digitally refined and corrected reissue of the entire manga, alongside a special pamphlet and a Protect Gear model figure.
Kerberos Panzer Cop has been adapted into films twice: first in 1991's StrayDog: Kerberos Panzer Cops, directed by Oshii, loosely based on the manga's premise; and again in 1999's Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, directed by Hiroyuki Okiura and written by Oshii, based on Part I of the manga. A sequel, Kerberos Saga Rainy Dogs, was serialized in Ace Tokunoh from 2003 to 2005, then published as an extended single volume in 2005.
Plot
Setting
Kerberos Panzer Cop is set in the 1950s in the Kerberos Saga's alternate timeline, where Nazi Germany won World War II, eventually denazified and restored the Weimar Republic, and occupied Japan (part of the Allies in this timeline) to establish authoritarian rule. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the German occupation attempts to globalize and urbanize Japan through a government called the , it sparks massive increases in poverty and class stratification, resulting in the rise of anti-government movements that escalate into terrorism when their protests are countered with repression. The Japanese government, unable to effectively handle the increase in terrorism and violence using regular police, but unable and unwilling to deploy the Japan Self-Defense Forces, forms the Metropolitan Security Police Organization (commonly "Metropolitan Police" (MP) or Shutokei (首都警); "Capital Police" or "CAPO" in English) to counter the terrorists and restore order to Tokyo. The Metropolitan Police's main combat force, the paramilitary Special Armed Garrison ("Special Unit" in English), nicknamed "Kerberos", are issued powerful military equipment such as MG 42 machine guns and powered exoskeletons called "Protect Gears", and are permitted to use violent force against their targets.
The Metropolitan Police and Kerberos succeed in their goals, quelling the spike in terrorism and forcing most of the terrorist groups to merge under a single group called the Sect. However, the Metropolitan Police faces friction from the Self-Police ("Local Police", "Metropolitan Police Force", or "NPA" in English)—officially the Tokyo Metropolitan Self-Police Department, whose jurisdiction overlaps with the Metropolitan Police—as well as the JSDF, while Kerberos's division, the Defense Division ("Capital Area Security Police Agency" in English), experiences interservice tensions with the Metropolitan Police's intelligence agency-like espionage unit, the Public Security Division. Additionally, into the 1950s, changes in Japanese society over time—improving living standards, the loss of the Sect's public appeal, and Kerberos's increasingly brutal tactics—lead to the necessity of Kerberos being brought into question.