Meet Musha Hyaku-Shiki, SD Gundam’s Golden Warrior

Musha Hyaku-Shiki SD Gundam Playing Card, Comic BomBom February 1990

What Is a Comic BomBom Furoku?

This card is a furoku — a bonus item bundled inside a magazine — from the February 1990 issue of Comic BomBom, the children’s manga monthly published by Kodansha from 1981 to 2007. Japanese youth magazines of the era routinely enclosed small gifts with each issue: stickers, paper crafts, miniature toys, and playing cards. The furoku gave readers a concrete reason to buy every issue and gave publishers a way to extend the characters running in their pages into readers’ hands.

This card — the six of spades — appears to have been part of a playing card set featuring SD Gundam characters. Die-cut marks suggest it was originally attached to a larger sheet or backing board that readers separated themselves, a format typical of the period. Because furoku were designed as a reading bonus rather than a lasting keepsake, many were discarded or damaged within months of the issue leaving shelves. Finding one intact more than three decades later reflects how rarely these items were ever set aside.

Hyaku-Shiki and Its Samurai Reincarnation

The character depicted is Musha Hyaku-Shiki, drawn in the squat, exaggerated SD (Super Deformed) style that defined the SD Gundam line’s visual identity. Two separate lineages come together in this design.

The first is Hyaku-Shiki itself: a gold-painted mobile suit from the 1985–1986 TV anime Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, produced by Sunrise. Its pilot goes by the name Quattro Bajeena — a pseudonym concealing the identity of Char Aznable. The Hyaku-Shiki’s all-gold finish set it apart visually within the Zeta Gundam lineup and has kept it recognizable to Gundam fans long after the series ended.

The second lineage is the Musha Gundam series, a major sub-line within SD Gundam developed by Bandai. Where mainstream Gundam media treats mobile suits as science-fiction hardware, Musha Gundam reimagines them as feudal Japanese samurai in full armor. Each suit receives a warrior name in Japanese, and Musha Hyaku-Shiki carries the original’s gold palette forward into golden samurai plate, with a helmet crest that references Hyaku-Shiki’s distinctive head design. The warrior name is a deliberate wordplay on the original designation — sharing the same reading while using different characters.

The SD Gundam Boom and the Furoku Tradition

Musha Gundam and Comic BomBom were tightly linked through the late 1980s and early 1990s. The series ran as manga content in BomBom’s pages alongside Bandai’s BB Senshi plastic model line — small, affordable kits that let readers build the same characters they followed in the magazine. The SD Gundam boom is generally placed between around 1988 and 1992, and the February 1990 issue falls squarely within that period.

Musha Gundam had limited official release outside Japan, which means international fans seeking this branch of the Gundam universe look specifically to domestic items from the original run. Hyaku-Shiki’s gold design crosses over to a wide audience: Zeta Gundam viewers know the original mobile suit, while SD Gundam enthusiasts recognize the warrior form from the BomBom manga and the BB Senshi kits. A playing card furoku from 1990 sits at the intersection of both — a compact artifact from the peak years of SD Gundam’s domestic popularity.