Upd: upon a short investigation, me and my friend [citation needed] meemm4star unraveled the knot: the three parts that I bought as a bundle from Amazon were actually volumes 2, 3, and 4 of the manga. The drawing is different, because as wiki puts it: "Volume 1 was published under the name Shotaro Ishinomori, but Ishinomori did not touch the drawings at all (drawn by Tetsuo Hiroi). Ishinomori draws from volume 2 on, because the 1st volume was an unexpected hit."
I’m inclined to think this is also the reason volume 1 wasn’t included in the Amazon bundle - the bundle is branded as “The complete digital collection of Shotaro Ishinomori” and the 1st volume wasn’t technically drawn by Ishinomori.
I solved this whole hullabaloo as I was commencing my work on translating the TV series. Turns out I was a massive Retadildo and had all 4 volumes on my hands all along. So I figured, I might as well throw them up on nyaa as a midsummer torrent in the absence of any real releases for a couple of months and because I’m too lazy to figure out how do I upload them to archive org, provided they don’t even get taken down right away as they are being currently sold on Amazon, now in the most complete incarnation of this torrent. Only two volumes were English translated, so I shouldn’t expect any more of those to pop up. Thus, if you ever wanted to scanlate volumes 3 and 4… please take your pills. But also, feel free to, because I ain’t gonna, I don’t trade in manga.

RAW Volume 1 ripped from Archive.org, quality is readable.
RAW Volumes 2-4 ripped from Amazon, quality - excellent.
Translated volumes 1 & 2 both ripped from Archive.org, translated by Betsey Schemer & Alan G. Gleason
Some sites also list a certain “Volume 4” of the RAW manga (would be 5 if we count the real volume 1), but I have no idea what is it, it’s “out of stock,” and I hope it’s irrelevant to my cause.

Man, I haven’t even started on any actual episodes of this anime yet, but my head hurts already.
borked a bunch of years in the filenames, but can’t be arsed

MAL | DDL