“These moments are cryptic, elegant, and erotically charged, with a cool, sexy style reminiscent of French New Wave films.”
- Publisher’s Weekly, on VEIL Volume 1

TL;DR: Veil is a series MSX Produced for UDON, and Veil volumes 1-4 are out now, but also sold-out at the distributor. Fourth printings of volumes 1 and 2 and second printings of volumes 3 and 4 are already underway, arriving in Spring 2026. In this overview, we’re focusing on its publication history, not the actual content of the series.

Before Mangasplaining was a thing, a book that Deb and I (hi, it’s Christopher) both agreed was a gorgeous and wonderful (and a damned shame that it wasn’t in English) was Veil by Kotteri!. Published in Japan by Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, Ltd. and serialized digitally, not to mention a stunningly beautiful full color manga, Veil fell through the cracks of North American manga licensing for YEARS. Deb and I were in a (now closed) bookstore in Tokyo on that fateful trip that birthed Mangasplaining, back in 2019, and we both turned and pointed at VEIL on the shelves at the same time and said it needed to be published. We didn’t know at the time that we’d be some of the people helping to make that happen.

So when MSX: Mangasplaining Extra became a thing thanks to Substack, well, let’s just say that Okinawa was our first project (already underway!) but VEIL was definitely in the first round of titles that we brainstormed.

We approached UDON with it because Deb and I both like UDON Chief Erik Ko quite a bit, and they were one of the only pubs doing high-spec, full-color manga at the time. I have to assume that the costs associated with full-color printing are why it wasn’t a licensing priority for other publishers for so long, but Erik took one look at it and said it was beautiful. “Let’s do it.”

At that meeting, we also agreed to Giga Town and No Roses Without Thorns (more on that in a future post), and history was made. We asked our friend Jocelyne Allen (who wrote up this awesome recommendation) to translate it, and we were able to work with the letterer of the French edition of Veil, Kevin Druelle, to letter our version since we liked the French version so much. Andrew (my partner and husband) leapt in to edit and project-manage, and the whole team knocked it out of the park. I love what they’ve produced and I’m incredibly proud of the whole team.

We handed the completed files to UDON for pre-press and publishing…

…at the worst possible time. Y’see, the largest distributor of comics in English, Diamond, had a sort of… cascading implosion for several years that ended with a full-on bankruptcy in 2025. It screwed everything up for pretty much every comic publisher in English to varying degrees, and caused tremendous market uncertainty. Amidst this, UDON was caught in the crosshairs. I’m not really allowed to talk about what I know due to confidentially agreements with publishers and decorum with friends, but please believe me when I say it was a bad time.

Luckily UDON was well-positioned and able to move to a great new distributor, Simon & Schuster, but it still screwed a lot of stuff up and it made things difficult for a couple years there. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, because it’s STILL making things difficult. More on that at the end.

But the good news is that in June, Veil Volumes 1 & 2 were released in English, published by UDON, produced by MSX.

Veil volumes 1 and 2 immediately sold out. What was supposed to be a six-month supply basically sold out at the distro level before they hit stores. This is sorta great news because it meant that the book was a hit, and sorta awful news because there weren’t enough to fill all the distributor orders that came in after.

Y’see, enough were printed to fill the orders Diamond had received, but when Simon & Schuster offered it to retailers, a LOT more orders came in. Like, a LOT more. Then, uh, this happened again, and again, over the next few months. UDON would reprint more Veil volume 1s and 2s (always more than the initial print run and on the advice of their distribution partners), more than enough to cover demand for backorders, except the backorders would increase at a rate not really seen in UDON’s history. But again and again, they’d be sold out on arrival at the Simon and Shuster warehouses.

So today, we’re thrilled to announce that UDON Entertainment’s English editions of Veil Volumes 3 and 4 have begun arriving in stores and from online retailers. And they, alongside the new third printings of Veil Volumes 1 and 2, are all sold out at the distributor level again. This means plenty of stores have copies available RIGHT NOW, but unfortunately not every store got their full order of copies, and there aren’t anymore available immediately.

But the good news is that UDON started a new printing of all four volumes, again more than the previous printings of all of volumes, and they SHOULD arrive in a few months. I mean, who knows, right? Things are completely wild in the world, and there’s some truly awful stuff going on, but ink is hitting paper at the printers, and bound books will be loaded onto a cargo ship soon. We’re all doing our best and glad so many people are so in love with these books, just like we are.

So that’s what’s been up with VEIL, the fourth MSX: Mangasplaining Extra title to see print (but sadly, not serialized due to licensing restrictions). We haven’t talked a lot about it here on the newsletter because it seemed silly to promote a book that most people couldn’t get their hands on, though we have been talking about it in Notes and over on the social media, like this photo above that I shared of The Beguiling in Toronto which has VEIL Volume 1 on their bestseller rack, with plenty of copies in stock in January.

So, what’s next for VEIL? Well this is already a bit long, but without explaining book distribution any further, let me say that VEIL Volumes 5, 6, and 7 will be solicited from Simon & Schuster in a way so as to properly collect all orders before they are printed, and then released on time (long-lead vs. drop-in, for folks in the biz).

This should mean no more on-release sell-outs for these upcoming volumes, but because of the switchover in distribution it will mean a bit of a wait for volume 5 to properly solicit orders, and when we have firm dates we’ll share here. I can say Veil volumes 5 and 6 are done, and volume 7 is in progress. And as I said above, Volumes 1-4 have already begun reprinting. We’ll mention here when they arrive.

On a final note, since is the first time I’m writing at length about Veil, I want to say that the prices and format of these full color books (US$15.99) were at my urging. I appreciate Erik and UDON pricing them that way at my request.

Originally the book was announced as a two-in-one hardcover (because I really wanted to spec it out!) but with the significant inflation of the past few years AND the worsening economic outlook, those hardcovers would have come out to around $60 USD. That honestly just didn’t sit right with me from a consumer PoV. I wanted these books to be accessible, and at $16 (when most other color manga is $20+) I think we did that.

We’re grateful that so many folks have bought in to this series as well at that price. UDON took a chance AND a financial hit pricing it 20% cheaper than their competitors and holding that price through multiple reprints. I’m truly grateful… This is rare in publishing anywhere. That’s not to say it’ll stay that price forever (holy shit the world is crazy, and it impacts a lot of things that are out of control, like paper supplies, currency conversion rates). The hardcover 2-in-1 edition of Veil could still happen some day (I mean, I wanna own ’em), but I’m glad we were able to provide this gorgeous story where we did at this time, and I thank you for your support in picking it up. - CWB

If you’d like to order or pre-order Veil volumes 1-4, please check with your local comic shop or bookstore — it makes a difference! You can also visit Simon & Shuster’s page for Veil to stay on top of the upcoming releases.

* The actual quote is "The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it, even if at first you think you cannot do it at all." It comes from Queer author, poet, and activist Langston Hughes 1 2 . It’s very good life advice, even though it’s not really about manga per se, but about much weightier things.

Hello and welcome to part two of the afterword(s) of Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka. As you know the manga wrapped up last week, with all 18 chapters available to read for subscribers until the end of this year (links below). This manga is translated into English by Ben Applegate, lettered by Phil Christie, and edited by myself, Christopher Woodrow-Butcher. This manga is published in print by Fantagraphics (Volume 3 of the printed manga arrives in stores November 25th, 2025!) and you can get the series at their website or wherever there are good books.

Search and Destroy Previous Chapters:
Volume One: Introduction (Free) | 00-01 (Free) | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 |
Volume Two: 07 (Free) | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12
Volume Three: 13 (Free) | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

Subscribe now

Editor Christopher here. As noted this is part two of our afterwords, with some of the fun rare artwork from the series revealed in our newsletter post earlier today. In this post we’ll dig into some of the justifiably angrier and more militant themes underpinning the work, reflecting the very difficult times in which we live. In this post you can look forward to:

• Atsushi Kaneko’s Original Afterword to Search and Destroy Volume 3

• Translator Ben Applegate’s final thoughts on working on Search and Destroy

• Christopher Woodrow-Butcher offers thanks to the folks who helped make this happen.

So with that said, buckle up for these epilogues to Search and Destroy.

Search and Destroy Vol. 3: Afterword
By Atsushi Kaneko

At the foundation of Osamu Tezuka’s works, I feel a deep and intense rage. That rage sometimes takes the form of a blazing fire that burns humanity to ash along with all our sins, or sometimes the form of a prayer offering condolence for the despair of the weak. During the time Osamu Tezuka lived, and during the time we live today, humanity was and remains foolish. We have failed to eliminate conflict, intolerance, and irrationality. As one person who lives in that world and has chosen the path of artistic expression, I also find myself motivated to work by rage.

In Dororo, a series that was unpopular even compared to the other works that Tezuka wrote in the middle of his life because its bleak tone made any broad appeal to readers of its time impossible, I can likewise feel a profound rage. It takes place in an age of disorder, populated by those who aspire to rule and those they oppress. Wild dogs swarm around endless piles of corpses. Demons run rampant, the byproducts of an apocalyptic age permeated by the stench of death. Hyakkimaru and Dororo are depicted as having had everything taken from them by this era, and they each face their own trials, with their rage as their only strength to carry on. Their rage is Tezuka’s own rage, and the merciless curses they hurl at the tyranny and violence of the ruling class are unmistakably Tezuka’s own words. From another standpoint, it is a story about identity. As he takes back, one at a time, the body parts that the demons stole from him, Hyakkimaru asks the question, “Who am I?” Though Search and Destroy is very different on the surface, I wanted it to carry on Dororo’s legacy at its core, even as I added elements that I hoped would give it modern appeal. For example, Hyaku, the equivalent of Hyakkimaru, has become a woman. I thought this would be a poignant choice, since her body is treated as a thing, an object to be thoroughly exploited and consumed. I also established the setting as a time of increasing inequality, discrimination, and social breakdown, intending for that to serve as one reason to draw a new Dororo for a modern age. To me, a story is a mirror to reflect the world, and I think of this one as a declaration of my rage against that world. This manga may be based on Dororo, but the rage I imbued it with had to be my own rage.

From the beginning of the story to the end, Hyaku possesses a fierce rage. Her rage is a wind at her back that seems as if it might sweep away her cruel fate, and it serves as something like pride, to keep her from losing herself. Her rage is just one of the things that Hyaku has inherited from her adoptive father Tsukumo, and which she then passes on to Doro. As the final kreach, the “microbiologist,” puts it, they are all rebels who relentlessly defy a cruel world and pass on the strength of that rage to others.

When we feel the irrational rage that is so abundant in this world, we can’t help but feel alone—because that feeling amounts to a realization of our own insignificance and powerlessness. At those times, touching something that has been charged with someone else’s rage, like a manga, book, movie, music, or other piece of art, demonstrates that there is someone else out there feeling the same rage, and that this feeling welling up inside us is not a mistake. Even if culture does not drive politics directly, it can change the hearts of people, one at a time. I do believe that rage, passed on in this way, can eventually change the world.

I am certain that the rage embedded in Tezuka’s manga is alive within me, giving me the courage, even now, to keep drawing my manga.

There could be no greater happiness for me than for my manga to wipe away someone else’s loneliness and give them the strength to keep raging.

Atsushi Kaneko
February 2020

Thoughts on Search and Destroy
By Ben Applegate

In its author's words, Search and Destroy by Atsushi Kaneko is a story about anger. For me, at least, this has been the defining emotion of 2025. Most days, I wake up angry, perhaps having heard the latest death tolls from Gaza or Sudan, and I go to sleep angry, perhaps having seen a report about a journalist being assaulted or arrested in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. I have been deeply and persistently upset before, but my anger has never been the dominating force in my life that it is now. In this, relative to my fellow Americans, I am “late to the party.” There are people who spent all day angry before this year. The sources of their anger vary. Some of them helped make Donald Trump president again.

If you find yourself in need of a way to contextualize your anger, Search and Destroy is my prescription. In the manga's inspiration, Dororo by Osamu Tezuka, there is a pulsing, animating anger—at personal wrongs but also at a broader unfairness—that Search and Destroy's author Atsushi Kaneko has identified and preserved in his new work. Both manga take place in worlds where petty monsters serve an amoral master whose ambitions can only take root because of social rot. It was a familiar story to Tezuka, who as a teenager walked through the ashes of the Osaka firebombing, and, sadly, it's familiar to us today.

As Search and Destroy begins, a global conflict has left open a power vacuum that one clever human megalomaniac (the “mayor”) and his 48 robotic “collaborators” rush to fill. The bitterness, devastation, and inequality that are war's legacy have deadened society's empathy toward individuals, which at the lower end of the social order include both decaying robots (known as “creatures”) and obsolete human workers. The personification of this broken world is Hyaku, who as a baby had her body broken up at the behest of the mayor, the parts distributed among his underlings.

We can look to these collaborators, who have each physically appropriated and jealously guard a part of Hyaku's dismembered body, to remind us that followers of fascist regimes do not pledge their loyalty to the leader because they are brave, but because they are cowardly; not because they alone have figured out the singular secret behind the good life, but because they have chosen cruelty and blind obedience as a way to paper over diverse individual deficiencies. Any crime is justified in exchange for their human parts—arms, eyes, ears, lungs, a tongue—and this taste of organic sensation unmediated by technology overloads their circuits, driving them into ecstasy.

Standing against the mayor are the racist, humans-first political opposition, and a Luddite mob that roams the street tearing apart innocent creatures. Social trust has all but disappeared. The enemy of my enemy is another enemy. The only righteous causes are those of Hyaku, Doro, and the migrant creatures who are drawn to the city by promises of freedom but end up held captive in an underground rare earth mineral mine, there to forge a pure, elemental conception of self and to foment a revolution.

I was honored to have the opportunity to translate Search and Destroy and pleased that it has been recognized by the comics community with an Eisner nomination and the most nominations of any series at the American Manga Awards in 2025—primarily because Kaneko-sensei is a brilliant artist who has been unknown in this country for far too long (here's hoping this is just the beginning). I’m especially pleased that this attention is coming this year, because Search and Destroy’s anti-fascism could not possibly be more relevant, rooted as it is in a blazing, indignant rage on behalf of the people in this, the real world.

I've spent several days this year visiting Delaney Hall, a private prison in Newark, New Jersey, near my home. First I went as a protester, hoping to prevent the facility from reopening, and now I volunteer on the weekends to help support people there hoping to visit their loved ones in detention. There is no way to make an appointment, and the process to get in is always changing. Currently, you have to figure out which “unit” your loved one is in, then come for one of just two sessions a week. Some people arrive as early as 6 am, because there is no way to tell whether the gate guard will strictly limit the number of inmates who can see visitors to as few as 15 or will be more lenient. There is no waiting area or amenities for visitors. Volunteers who dedicate many more hours than I do arrive early with chairs, drinks, and food. They erect tents in the triangular space of black asphalt, which is bordered by a driveway, a barbed-wire fence, and a road that also leads to a waste processing plant and a fat rendering facility. (When there's no wind, and the hot, acrid air settles, I have to launder my clothes as soon as I get home.)

One day last month, a mother and her 5-year-old daughter had driven three-and-a-half hours to see her father, who’s likely to be deported any day now if he hasn’t been already. I played with that little girl for an hour while her mother spoke to an attendant in a corporate polo shirt. The kid was hilarious. Her English was about as good as my Spanish, but we pretended a big sign covered in anti-ICE graffiti was a drum set, and we wailed on it with sticks until it “broke” and she had to fix it with her “screwdriver” (another stick). That weekend was one of the stricter ones, and they hadn’t shown up early, so in the end they had to get back in the car and drive the three-and-a-half hours home without seeing their husband and father.

Last weekend, I met a woman whose father has been in Delaney for four weeks. He has lived in the U.S. for thirty years and works in construction, she said, and when he returned to a job site to clean up, he was arrested because the cops thought he was “stealing scrap.” That misunderstanding became a troublesome legal case, which became a settlement to make it go away. But it didn't go away. Her mother and father went in to renew their immigration status on the same day, as they have many times before, but this time only her mother came out. I also met a Japanese woman who said she has lived in the U.S. for three years and met her husband here. They were planning to move overseas for her new job posting in four months. Instead, he was arrested at a routine immigration appointment in Manhattan. We talked for hours in Japanese, including about manga.

To members of their respective in-groups, the fascism of the 20^th century offered, and the American fascism of Donald Trump offers today, the chance to flatten the disquieting individuality of their personal grievances into a simple, comforting unity of purpose: the spiteful exercise of power to disintegrate social identities and physical bodies that don't fit in. Search and Destroy offers elegant comment on this brutalizing, seductive formula with its human-robot divide (whose complexity certainly puts it on par with the best science fiction) and its very literal metaphor of Hyaku and Doro's physical bodies being captured and compromised by those in power. In this, it does better than provide the fleeting analgesic of escapism—it brings the lasting assurance that someone understands.

At this moment, when fascism is resurgent around the world, when pregnant and trans and queer people are being treated with a cruelty that has nothing to do with the lives they just want to be left alone to live, when unaccountable homeland security officers are kidnapping our neighbors and their children to fill a national network of concentration camps they have just secured funding to expand, I sometimes lose faith that what I do for a living, working in comics, really matters. I even despair that there is anything I can do that will have any kind of real impact on the world. There can be no single antidote to that feeling, but Search & Destroy helps. No one could sum up why better than Kaneko-sensei himself, so I urge you to read his afterword to this scintillating manga; remember that you belong to you, not them—and stay angry.

Ben Applegate
August, 2025

Thank you.

Well after that one-two punch by Kaneko-sensei and Ben, there’s really not a lot left to say about this work. For my part, it was my honor to help bring it to English readers for the first time, its core message ringing deeply true to me and hopefully, as Ben says, something of an antidote to the times we live in. It’s not lost on my that the very website upon which this is serialized this is definitely hewing towards the fascist forces of the day, but while we still can, I’m proud to share these works and, to paraphrase Kaneko-sensei, to be a rebel who relentlessly defies a cruel world and passes on the strength of that rage to others.

So, some thanks are in order to the many folks who helped bring this work into English with me.

Jocelyne Allen & Peter Birkemoe: Thank you both for your support and for introducing me to the works of Atsushi Kaneko many, many years ago. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have known just how good his work is.

Stéphane Beaujean and Sébastien Ludmann: When I first talked about publishing Kaneko-sensei in English, I appreciated your strong support and encouragement, even recommending Search and Destroy as a great first work in English. Thank you both!

Frederic Toutlemonde of Tezuka Productions: Thank you for taking a chance on MSX and going to bat for us, and for your years of friendship. I greatly appreciate everything you’ve done. Our sincere thanks to TezukaPro for their support as well!

Eric Reynolds: Book Numbers 2, 3, and 4! Dozens more to go. Thanks man, amazing working with you and the team.

Jacq Cohen, Tucker Stone, Paul Baresh, and David Hyde: I’m really floored by the incredible work all of you did to help spread the word about this series. I’ve never done so many podcast appearances or interviews! Thanks to all of you for your hard work, it was great working with you.

Aki Yanagi: Thanks for everything you’ve done to help coordinate between MSX and our friends in Japan, and for your friendship! I greatly appreciate it.

Frederico Anzalone and Peach Momoko: Thanks to you both for contributing important and excellent pieces to the print editions of Search and Destroy!

Deb Aoki: Thank you for your support of this title, and for editing its cohort partner Wandering Cat’s Cage at the same time. And for the million other amazing things you do that make all of our lives better.

To Chip and David and Deb (again) the Mangasplaining crew: This couldn’t happen without all y’all. Looking forward to releasing that next episode soon.

To the creative team of translator Ben Applegate and letterer Phil Christie: Can I just say how much I appreciate your phenomenal enthusiasm for this project? Both of you responding so strongly and positively to the then-secret news that we had licensed Search and Destroy made me realize we’d done something very right, at a time when things were very difficult. Thanks to both of you, and I hope we can work together on another project in future (if your insanely busy schedules allow).

Atsushi Kaneko: Thank you for entrusting your creation to us, and for working so closely with us to help make the release of Search and Destroy in English something special. It’s a rare gift in an industry that usually works as hard as possible to keep the North American team segregated from the Japanese creators, and I think all of our editions were made so much better for this close relationship. I hope we are able to work together again soon.

To The Readers and especially paid subscribers: You are absolutely helping to make manga projects like this possible, thank you.

Special thanks of course to my incredible husband and my brother and family for their support during the early days of serialization with this title, Wandering Cat’s Cage, and Okinawa. 2022 feels like a million years ago.

Finally, I’d like to take a moment to recognize the achievements of designer Ryan McCardle who designed Search and Destroy Volume 1 (and whose templates we used for the rest of the series). Ryan passed away last year, and he did an amazing job on our book. My condolences to his friends and family.

Christopher Woodrow-Butcher

PRAISE FOR SEARCH AND DESTROY:

"Kaneko reimagines Tezuka's 1960s epic fantasy saga Dororo as a gritty, fast-paced cyberpunk thriller ... Kaneko retains Tezuka's relentless pacing, flair for melodrama, and thematic focus on justice, corruption, and individuality within an oppressive society, while integrating elements of body horror and an increased focus on the unsustainability of societies where vital resources are controlled by a thriving minority, to the detriment of the masses." — Library Journal Starred Review

"It's a blast of pure cyberpunk energy." — Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Richly imagined..." — The New York Times

"Search and Destroy grabs you by the throat with its opening chapter and never lets go." — Multiversity Comics

"A captivating work... This series would be great for fans of Naoki Ursawa's Pluto books or Tsutomu Nihei's Knights of Sidonia series." — Booklist

Hello, and welcome to the afterword, and afterwards, of Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy, based on the manga Dororo by Osamu Tezuka. The manga wrapped up last week and all 18 chapters are currently available to read for subscribers until the end of this year. This manga is translated into English by Ben Applegate, lettered by Phil Christie, and edited by myself, Christopher Woodrow-Butcher. This manga is published in print by Fantagraphics, and you can get this volume at their website or like wherever there are good books.

Search and Destroy Previous Chapters:
Volume One: Introduction (Free) | 00-01 (Free) | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 |
Volume Two: 07 (Free) | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12
Volume Three: 13 (Free) | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

Subscribe now

Editor Christopher here. I wanted to take a moment, with this week’s postings, to really celebrate all the hard work that went into making Search and Destroy a reality, and thank some of the people that made the title happen, and made it a success. Here’s what you can look forward to today:

In this newsletter:

• Peach Momoko’s Tribute Artwork and Afterword to Search and Destroy Volume 2

• Atsushi Kaneko’s unseen rough sketches created for Search and Destroy

In part two:

• Atsushi Kaneko’s Original Afterword to Search and Destroy Volume 3

• Translator Ben Applegate’s final thoughts on working on Search and Destroy

• Christopher Woodrow-Butcher offers thanks to the folks who helped make this happen.

Alright, let’s get into it, with this amazing tribute art and afterword/response, originally printed in Search and Destroy v2, courtesy of the incredible Peach Momoko.

Search and Destroy v2 Afterword
By Peach Momoko

I have the same questions as Doro does! “Why does Hyaku want human body parts?” She’s stronger with the machine parts. 

I feel the pain, seeing Hyaku getting weaker as she recovers the human body parts that were stolen from her… But it’s really interesting seeing how Hyaku overcomes her weaknesses.

I love the juxtaposition of the Sengoku period from Tezuka Sensei’s original Dororo, and the timeless science fiction period of Kaneko Sensei’s Search and Destroy. 

It is also very interesting to see Tezuka-sensei’s yokai concept changed to Kaneko-sensei’s visionary sci-fi “Kreach.” It’s perfect, because a yokai is a being that is born out of human desires, like greed. And I believe that machines are also the same product, something that humans have made from their desires.”

Peach Momoko
Tokyo, 2024

Christopher here again. We were so grateful to receive this incredible piece of artwork and these thoughts from Peach about the series to that point. Thank you again if you’re reading, Peach! :D

So, funny story about that by the way. We checked with Kaneko-sensei and licensor Tezuka Productions’ Frederic Toutlemonde about including this in our edition. We even translated Peach Momoko’s comments back into Japanese, so Kaneko-sensei could read them and approve them directly. He was very happy to see this and appreciated it, even though this sort of thing isn’t done in Japan. At MOST, you might get another author’s recommendation on the obi-band wrapped around the book, so this was a big ask on our part and we’re glad he said yes (as did TezukaPro).

Except, there was a bit of a miscommunication here, as in the seven months between asking and them getting their copies, both Kaneko-sensei and Frederic (right, in the picture below) forgot about the image part. And so when we gave them their copies of the books at dinner in Tokyo, they were shocked and delighted. Here’s the exact moment that happened:

It was all happily accepted and everything was set, but it was still an hilarious and surprising moment. It really was a great dinner, and in addition to the above fine folks Search and Destroy letterer Phil Christie was there, as was I (Chris) and MSX’s Deb Aoki too, making for a fun evening. We even finished up at a hidden Brazilian music bar with Caipirinha’s! Making manga is really difficult, but also really fun sometimes!

Prep Sketches for Search and Destroy
Illustrated by Atsushi Kaneko

In June 2024, I visited Atsushi Kaneko at his gallery show at Vanilla Gallery, in Ginza, Tokyo. It’s a great gallery for alternative and underground/subculture artworks, with a lot of manga creators exhibiting. I’d previously seen Kaneko-sensei’s exhibits there before, alongside work by Gengoroh Tagame, Usamaru Furuya, and most recently Jiraiya (we’ll have a report on that here on the newsletter, soon!). While Kaneko-sensei works digitally now, it was interesting to see both his recent digital work printed out at-size, as well his older pen-and-ink originals from series like DEATHCO, Soil, Wet Moon, and Bambi, too. And he also included… preparatory sketches created before he began Search and Destroy! I actually noticed them behind his head while taking the photo above. I knew right away that I wanted to share them all with you here, and Kaneko-sensei was gracious enough to allow me to do so with some of the items. Please enjoy them.

All contents by Atsushi Kaneko. Search and Destroy ©2018-2025 Tezuka Productions.

That’s it for Part 1 of our Afterwords post. Look for Part 2 in your inbox later today. We wanted to keep each email roughly “read in my inbox” length for a change. :)

Best,

-CWB

SEARCH AND DESTROY ©2025 Tezuka Productions.
All rights reserved. Produced by MICRO MAGAZINE.
English translation rights arranged with Tezuka Productions.

Please do not distribute, share, reproduce, or pirate this work.

It’s worth noting we’ll be doing one more “bonus chapter” of Search and Destroy next week, which includes Kaneko-sensei’s afterword and a few other surprises. This will be free to read for everyone, so we look forward to seeing everyone again next week.

Subscribe now

For now though, this post is for paid subscribers to Mangasplaining Extra, with CBZs and PDFs of this chapter at the end of this post. Everyone else can enjoy a few preview pages, or the free chapters available below:

Search and Destroy Previous Chapters:
Volume One: Introduction (Free) | 00-01 (Free) | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 |
Volume Two: 07 (Free) | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12
Volume Three: 13 (Free) | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

Regular readers will know that we got the grand climax last week, with all of the disparate threads and characters’ stories coming together in a chorus and a crescendo, sort of like that middle bit of Les Mis. So what follows is both the conclusion and an epilogue, a denouement, to the story, but Kaneko-sensei still has some incredible surprises up his sleeve for Hyaku.

There are a few double-page spreads this episode that have a bit more punch on the website, FWIW. Enjoy!

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Search and Destroy - Chapter 18

By Atsushi Kaneko, based on the story Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
Translated by Ben Applegate, Lettered by Phil Christie.

Trigger Warning: Self-harm

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Hello, and welcome back to the climax of Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy, based on the manga Dororo by Osamu Tezuka. This is the second-last chapter of volume 3, and this post is for paid subscribers to Mangasplaining Extra, with CBZs and PDFs of this chapter at the end. Everyone else, please enjoy these few preview pages or the free chapters available below.

Search and Destroy Previous Chapters:
Volume One: Introduction (Free) | 00-01 (Free) | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 |
Volume Two: 07 (Free) | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12
Volume Three: 13 (Free) | 14 | 15 | 16 |

This is it, the big climax of Search and Destroy that we’ve all been waiting for for… a few years now. Gosh! Thanks to everyone who’s still reading. Now isn’t a bad time at all to sign up for Mangasplaining Extra’s paid service btw, as you’ll be able to read basically all of Search and Destroy, including this week’s ABSOLUTELY WILD 80-PAGE CHAPTER. Seriously, this is like, four issues of a Marvel comic here. Wild.

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Before we dive in, I did want to touch on the Eisner Awards that were just held this past weekend. Search and Destroy was nominated for an Eisner for ‘Best Manga’, and this was of course a tremendous honor, and also the first Eisner nomination for a Mangasplaining title. We were all really grateful for the nomination, Ben even wrote a killer acceptance speech if we won, but alas we did not take home the prize. The Eisner instead went to Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tokyo Higoro, which I think of as sort of a cousin to the MSX books, because we actually published the prototype version here on Substack (and a behind-the-scenes version, too!). So, a hearty congratulations to Matsumoto-sensei and the folks at VIZ Media for the win. I hope Ben gets to give his victory speech at the American Manga Awards in August.

As mentioned this is the penultimate chapter of the series, and Search and Destroy Volume 1 & Volume 2 are currently available in Print from our partners at Fantagraphics, and you can pre-order Volume 3 (September 2025) at retailers everywhere.

Buy Search and Destroy Volume 1: Fantagraphics | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Buy Search and Destroy Volume 2: Fantagraphics | Amazon | B&N
Pre-order Search and Destroy Volume 3: Fantagraphics | Amazon | B&N

Finally: This chapter is 80 pages. It’s not gonna be readable on your phone. Maybe get the app or come to the website to read it:

Get more from MSX: Mangasplaining Extra in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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Search and Destroy - Chapter 17

By Atsushi Kaneko, based on the story Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
Translated by Ben Applegate, Lettered by Phil Christie.

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IN THIS EPISODE
00:00: Dogsred vol. 1
1:04:16: THE BREAK
1:06:00: We’re picking books this week!

Dogsred Volume 1, by Satoru Noda
Translated by John Werry
Lettering by Steve Dutro

Published by VIZ Media. Available in print, ebook, and digital serialization on Shonen Jump and Manga Plus.

Audio editing by David Brothers. Show notes by Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and Deb Aoki
Recorded April 14th, 2024

BEFORE WE GET STARTED

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast! As mentioned last time, we had been recording even while not uploading episodes. We’re a little over a year behind our recording at this point, so a LOT has happened in the world of Dogsred since we talked about it. For one, there’s now almost 50 chapters! But for two, and much more importantly, the book is actually in print now! In fact, the first two volumes are now in print from VIZ Media in English, and available wherever you get your manga! So please take all of that part of this episode with a grain of salt…

That said, the first 3 chapters ARE still available to read for free on Shonen Jump and Manga Plus, so you can check out the links up top too.

Speaking of the chapters, volume 1 of Dogsred contains the first seven chapters of the manga, but we actually read the first 8 chapters for this episode, and Deb and Christopher read way, way ahead. So please consider this episode to have spoilers for at least Dogsred Volumes 1 & 2.

ABOUT SATORU NODA

Satoru Noda was born in Kitahiroshima, Hokkaido, Japan. He’s best known for his manga series Golden Kamuy, recently completed by VIZ Media, adapted into anime and live action films, and a legitimate cultural force in Japan. His great-grandfather was a military settler in Hokkaido and veteran of the Russo-Japanese War. In fact, the protagonist of Golden Kamuy, Sugimoto Saichi, is actually named for his grandfather!

Noda worked as a manga assistant for 10 years before making his debut. He was an assistant to the manga creator Mitsurou Kubo (writer of the hit ice-skating anime Yuri on Ice) creator of the high school cheerleading/time-slip manga Again!!, and the grown-up romantic comedy/drama manga Moteki, both published in English by Kodansha. He also worked as an assistant under the veteran manga creator Yasuyuki Kunimoto, who sadly passed away in 2018.

Noda-sensei doesn’t make many (if any?) public appearances, and it looks like all of the photos of him online are actually of his editor, Ookuma Hakkou, who accepted an award on his behalf one time. Instead, he’ll either draw Sugimoto in his stead, or the serial killer character Henmi from Golden Kamuy volume 4… which is… a choice:

Noda’s full professional debut was with the ice hockey manga Spinamarada!, serialized in Weekly Young Jump, which ran for 7 volumes and is almost guaranteed never to be translated to English. It was considered a commercial failure, sadly. Fun fact that we share later in the episode, the manga is actually about the skating move “Spin-o-rama” and he misheard and titled his series that? Which is amazing?

You can see what a Spin-o-rama is here:

[DEB:] The "Spin-o-rama” move also makes an appearance in Dogred, in Chapter 38.

ABOUT DOGSRED

This brings us to today’s manga, Dogsred, serialized in Young Jump magazine, which is an out-and-out reboot and retooling of the earlier Supinamarada! manga! I don’t think I knew it was a reboot of that series when we recorded this episode. Dogsred started serialization on July 27, 2023, and continues to this day with five volumes released in Japan, and two in North America.

So what is Dogsred? Well I’m glad you asked, here’s how VIZ Media describes the first two volumes:

Volume 1: After winning the national championship, 15-year-old figure skater Rou Shirakawa was on his way to the Olympics. But with his mother’s tragic death on his mind, he threw it all away in an outburst of rage. Banned from figure skating, he and his sister move to Hokkaido. When he meets some local kids at the skating pond, they convince him to be a stand-in player for their soon-to-be-disbanded hockey team. The team has never won a game, and they’re up against the local champs—but if they’ve got to go down, they want to score at least one goal before it’s all over. Rou hasn’t got a clue how to play ice hockey, but he sure knows how to skate!

Volume 2: As the school year comes to a close, it’s time for the powerhouse Oinokami High ice hockey team to win the championship once again, but have they lost their edge? Then, after one of the biggest natural disasters in Japanese history, the people of northern Japan are determined to carry on. When the new school year starts, Rou and his friends from Miyamori enter Oinokami High School. They decide to try out for the hockey team, but before they can join, they have to survive a grueling daylong trial under the eye of the eccentric Coach Nihei.

• VIZ Media

Now let’s get to it!

02:13 - Hi there, Christopher here, and as I mentioned up top this episode is coming out waaay after we recorded it. Dogsred is out now in print and has lots of chapters to read online (legitimately…) as well. Because more info has come out about this series since we’re further from the series’ launch, we’ve got lots more info that we didn’t when we recorded this episode. I don’t thing anything is egregiously wrong, just a little out of date, so I hope you’ll forgive us.

03:10 - David had my back, and if you listen to the last 20 seconds of the podcast you’ll see how faulty my memory wasn’t…

Also in here and for the first little bit, Chip and I talk about the sort of strange pacing of this book. It’s front-loaded, lots of info-dumps, lots of trying to make you care about the character in the first chapter. Apparently (as we found out later) Noda-sensei felt that his previous series Supinamarada! started too slowly and didn’t grab folks, and went hard on the opening here to try and hook people quick. It may account for some of our issues with the book.

7:30 - The lips aren’t great. I have no idea what’s going on with her face here. The drawing of the skating is great though, and David actually comes back to reference it later in the episode.

I think we lost the video for this episode so I can’t show you Chip’s actual look of disgust, but I’m sure you can imagine.

13:00 - These guys don’t look like teenagers, in my humble opinion, and they’re all like weirdly grizzled, Golden Kamuy-style.

Now that said, I think David makes a great point when he says that they look like teens in a Shonen Jump manga, as these characters are supposed to be about the same age as Jotaro, from Hirohiko Araki’s Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, which you can see below is 17 years old…

It makes sense, as Noda has cited Araki’s work as an influence.

We also talked about this issue as it appeared in one of the most important shonen sports works, Ashita No Joe, which had Joe as a pro-level boxer beating up grownups at 14. Looks like it’s a genre trope!

17:30 - I think I bounced off this series at first because of the disconnect in tone between my expectations and reality, and then secondarily for the really info-dump ice hockey explainer stuff. I think if I had more closely caught on to what was going on with the tone and whatnot, say by an obvious over-reaction appearing somewhere as a “clue”, I might’ve had a better time with it at the beginning.

18:34 - Like we said, there’s spoilers for volume 2 in this episode! Because yes, they do “speedrun” a bit of the beginning of the story to get to the 3/11 disaster in Japan and how it affected these young people and their career aspirations. I think by the end of volume 2 and the beginning of volume 3, the manga is really where the creator wants it to be, and I found myself enjoying the later chapters more. That said, it really does propel you through, so it’s not a “it starts getting good in volume 3” situation, it’s solid from the beginning (unless you know all about Hockey…), it’s more of a “it comes into its own.”

21:30 - It really is interesting what the Golden Kamuy manga and its success did to shine a spotlight on the Ainu people and the settling of Hokkaido. I can’t think of many pieces of comics or manga that have had as huge of a (positive) impact on a society as Golden Kamuy.

I need a clickbait YouTube video on this, “5 COMICS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING” and like Golden Kaumy might be top-2.

23:00:

“The baseball bat is not for taking out the catcher when you’re approaching the plate, to get another run”
- Christopher

“You’re describing a much more interesting sport.”
- Chip

24:25 - This becomes something of a theme for me this season: Manga could be better if it wasn’t beholden to the restrictions of the manga industry. I do bring this up with a few other reads later on as well.

25:05 - Ah, the overly-brutal asshole coach with outdated training methods, which really is a trope in manga.

We first encountered this trope in Akiko Higashimura’s Blank Canvas, which I think we all liked quite a bit. You can listen to that episode here: https://www.mangasplaining.com/blog/ep-31-blank-canvas-by-akiko-higashimura/

26:58 - You’re just gonna have to read the comic to get the “guy wearing his own face on a shirt” gag.

27:45 - We will, however, share with you this insane cat sequence from chapter 1:

You can also see what we’re talking about here with like Sketchup and whatnot with the cabin in the top panel.

28:05 - I feel like I’ve referenced this Maxell ad before, of the speakers just blowing everything else away…?

That’s the vibe that I got from this page, where Rou has stepped onto the ice for the first time and the sheer power, presence, and intensity of his starting pose has a physical effect on the audience members:

28:22 - Thank goodness for Tomoko-chan, the only person in the book who understands the weight and gravity of what’s going on inside Rou’s tortured soul.

29:45 - So yeah, this is apparently called “Glow Puck” and it was kind of deeply hated by Canada on the whole. But it was when Fox got the NHL license and wanted to make the game easier to follow for new players… and they did it like this:

Dogsred actually does do something similar here, by often giving the puck a trail or a little extra bit of attention and glow, which Chip didn’t love.

30:50 - Sydney Crosby manga!

My algorithm is gonna be wacky after looking up all of this hockey stuff.

32:16 - One of the things we loved most in Dogsred was the storytelling and the visual elements used to convey it. Chip liked the strong storytelling but hated the arrows (as you can see above). David mentioned these crazy blocky shadows made entirely in tone, and then there was a fascinating mix of chunky shadows incorporating arrows and speedlines. Some really interesting stuff!

34:30 - As you can see from the examples previous, the facemasks are generally not shown if it’ll interfere with showing the emotions of the characters. But as mentioned, there are a lot of options now, like plastic facemasks, though some players claim they warp their vision too much:

35:00 - I also wanted to include an example of character’s faces appearing inside their word balloons for people whoa re talking from off-panel. I think I first saw this in the American comic Impulse, by Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos?

42:09 - We’re not going to include the images here, but from later on in the series in a particularly grueling training sequence, and there’s a bear, a phallic log, and a truck, and what happens is obscene and hilarious. You’re just gonna have to read it, it’s around chapter 20.

45:12 - Trouble, a weirdly controversial comic book series from Marvel comics at the time, used photo covers as it was intended to be an update on old romance/slice-of-life comics from Marvel’s past… but they actually made it about Peter Parker’s mom & dad and Aunt May & Uncle Ben. Honestly, I thought it was a good idea to have photo covers back in the day, and in today’s context there’s nothing scandalous about this at all, but people were really up in arms about it.

For comparison, here’s the most recent Weekly Young Jump cover

You can make up your own mind on that.

49:10 - Still not showing you the bear.

51:35 - A super boring fight drawn like a pretty real-life hockey fight.

54:15 - This is a great bit of Mangasplaining, Deb! Or perhaps Catsplaining! Animals really (generally) don’t like those full bottles of water…

57:48 - The younger players are weird as hell, but they add a lot of fun to the proceedings.

Now these goofy little guys look like hockey players. Several of them end up narrating the match.

I think we talked about this in Ashita no Joe and another episode or two maybe, but the kids end up playing a “Greek Chorus” sort of a role, commenting on the action. In this case literally through narration “in-world” but also for us as readers. This is some complex storytelling from Noda here, good stuff!

59:00 - Somewhere in here, David mentions a wrestling promo that takes a shot at The Toronto Maple Leafs, and he graciously provided a video for you to enjoy.

1:01 - Supinamarada! Can’t remember where I read that anecdote though, sorry for not being able to source it.

1:03:00 - And finally, Chip jumps ahead and shouts-out the move SLAP SHOT! with Paul Newman, his favorite sports move of all time. I like this one too, though my fav is probably either The Natural with Robert Redford on the Ping Pong movie based on Taiyo Matsumoto’s manga. But SLAP SHOT! is really great too, worth watching!

01:04:16 THE BREAK

TIME TO PICK BOOKS: We had a fun time this episode, and picking books for future episodes was no different!

David “tricks” Chip into choosing a special “Is it manga?” episode with two self-published works, Death Transit Tanager by Karl Kerschl, & Fighting Storm by Aleksis "Sarracenian" and Brian Naughton. You can actually read both books for free! And I’ve taken so long with this episode that actually there’s a print book out now for Death Transit Tanager:

Death Transit Tanager: https://karlkerschl.com/death-transit-tanager/
Fighting Storm: https://sarracenian.itch.io/krfightingstorm

Christopher bargains for Chip to cover She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat, by Sakaomi Yuzaki and published by Yen Press.

Deb picks Yakuza Fiance by Asuka Konishi, published by Seven Seas Entertainment.

And Chip is bullied into covering two more volumes of Even Though We’re Adults, by Takako Shimura and published by Seven Seas. Lotta Seven Seas titles!

So the upcoming episodes look like this (barring any last-minute changes or sponsored episodes):

• #121 - The Fable vol. 1 & vol. 8 by Katsuhisa Minami (Kodansha)

• #122 - Tokyo These Days vol 1 by Taiyo Matsumoto (VIZ)

• #123 - Short Cuts vol. 1 by Usamaru Furuya (VIZ, Out of Print)

• #124 - Yakuza Fiance vol. 1 by Asuka Konishi (Seven Seas Entertainment)

• #125 - "Is it manga? Double-header: Death Transit Tanager by Karl Kerschl & Fighting Storm by Sarracenian

• #126 - Even Though We're Adults vols. 3 & 4 from Takako Shimura (Seven Seas)

• #127 - She Loves to Cook, She Loves To Eat, by Sakaomi Yuzaki (Yen Press)

And that’s this week in Mangasplaining! This episode is also available wherever you get your podcasts, so please subscribe and leave a review, so others can discover our show.

Also, if you’d like to get the latest episode delivered straight to your inbox along with exclusive interviews, articles and new chapters of manga you can’t read anywhere else, subscribe to our Substack newsletter. See what you’re missing at Mangasplaining Extra!

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Next week on Mangasplaining:
Get ready for the gangster action/comedy THE FABLE, as we cover volume 1 and volume 8!

Thanks so much for listening! Please support your local comic and manga specialty shop when purchasing these books. You can also check your local library for print and digital lending options, they have TONS of manga! Finally, thanks to D.A.D.S. for their musical accompaniment for this episode.

Hello, and welcome back to Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy Volume 3, based on the manga Dororo by Osamu Tezuka. This is the fourth chapter of volume 3, and this post for paid subscribers to Mangasplaining Extra, with CBZs and PDFs of this chapter at the end. Everyone else, please enjoy these few preview pages or the free chapters available below.

Search and Destroy Previous Chapters:
Volume One: Introduction (Free) | 00-01 (Free) | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 |
Volume Two: 07 (Free) | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12
Volume Three: 13 (Free) | 14 | 15

We say this every episode now, but WOW this chapter is full of spoilers for the series, and we recommend getting caught up on the above chapters before continuing. This chapter is only 44 pages this week, so only double a standard 22ish page comic book. ;)

Many of MSX’s great titles are now available to buy at book and comic stores everywhere! Search and Destroy Volume 1 & Volume 2 are available in Print from our partners at Fantagraphics, and you can pre-order Volume 3 (September 2025) at retailers everywhere.

Buy Search and Destroy Volume 1: Fantagraphics | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Buy Search and Destroy Volume 2: Fantagraphics | Amazon | B&N
Pre-order Search and Destroy Volume 3: Fantagraphics | Amazon | B&N

Subscribe now

Search and Destroy - Chapter 16

By Atsushi Kaneko, based on the story Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
Translated by Ben Applegate, Lettered by Phil Christie.
Reads right-to-left. Looks better on the Substack app or website.

Get more from MSX: Mangasplaining Extra in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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Hello, and welcome back to Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy Volume 3, based on the manga Dororo by Osamu Tezuka. This is the third chapter of volume 3, and this post for paid subscribers to Mangasplaining Extra, with CBZs and PDFs of this chapter at the end. Everyone else, please enjoy these few preview pages or the free chapters available below.

Search and Destroy Previous Chapters:
Volume One: Introduction (Free) | 00-01 (Free) | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 |
Volume Two: 07 (Free) | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12
Volume Three: 13 (Free) | 14

This chapter is full of spoilers for the series, and we recommend getting caught up on the above chapters before continuing. This chapter is also 50 pages, a little over double a standard 22ish page comic book at this point, so we hope you’re enjoying this incredible work. Also a quick note on some good news before we get started.

Search and Destroy Volume 1 Nominated for an Eisner Award

The big news this week is that the print edition of Search and Destroy Volume 1 published by our friends at Fantagraphics has been nominated for an Eisner Award in the manga category, also known as “Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia.” We’re thrilled to see this recognition for the team on this, and our congratulations go out to Kaneko-sensei, the good folks at TezukaPro, Fantagraphics, and of course our amazing creative team of translator Ben Applegate and letterer Phil Christie. There’s a lot of other folks to thank too, but we will have sort of a round-up of all of that news next week.

But if you are a comics professional in any capacity, or a retailer, or librarian, you are eligible to vote in the Eisner Awards. You can register to vote at https://cci.tiny.us/2025Eisners and please do so by May 29th. Voting ends for people who have pre-registered on June 5th.

Search and Destroy Volume 1 is currently available in Print from our partners at Fantagraphics, and you can pre-order Volume 2 (June 2025) & Volume 3 (September 2025) at retailers everywhere.

Buy Search and Destroy Volume 1: Fantagraphics | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Pre-order Search and Destroy Volume 2: Fantagraphics | Amazon | B&N
Pre-order Search and Destroy Volume 3: Fantagraphics | Amazon | B&N

Search and Destroy - Chapter 15

By Atsushi Kaneko, based on the story Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
Translated by Ben Applegate, Lettered by Phil Christie.
Reads right-to-left. Looks better on the Substack app or website.

Get more from MSX: Mangasplaining Extra in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

Read along with our show notes at Mangasplaining.com or get our show notes, manga, and so much more at MangasplainingExtra.com.

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IN THIS EPISODE

00:00 Kaiju No. 8 Volume 1, by Naoya Matsumoto
01:02:49 THE BREAK
01:03:30 SHOUT-OUTS: Manga, BD, Novels, movies… this is a hell of a bunch of recommendations.

Kaiju no. 8 vol. #1
by Naoya Matsumoto
Translated by: David Evelyn
Editor: Karla Clark
Lettering by: Brandon Bovia
Published by Shonen Jump / VIZ Media. Available in print / digital on Shonen Jump and MangaPlus by Shueisha

Audio editing by David Brothers. Show notes by Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and Deb Aoki
Recorded March 10th, 2024

BEFORE WE GET STARTED

Hi all, Christopher here. Nice to be back with a second episode in two weeks! We’re getting back on track and we have quite a backlog of episodes to get through, as even when we weren’t uploading, we were recording! This episode was recorded a little over a year before time of writing this, in March 2024. At that time, the Kaiju No. 8 anime had been announced but hadn’t aired, and so there might be a little cognitive dissonance for those of you listening here in May 2025.

Also, we talk about not just volume 1 but volume 2 as well, so spoilers for that. Also, weirdly, some random spoilers for One Piece volume 9 and Nami, if you’re just starting that series out. Fair warning!

Finally: Super happy to note that Deb wrote big pieces of this week’s notes too. Let’s start with Deb writing about today’s manga creator, Naoya Matsumoto:

ABOUT NAOYA MATSUMOTO (松本直也)

Born on May 2, 1982 in Hyogo Prefecture. He’s 43! So when he’s talkin’ about how a 30-year old protagonist might feel grey around the edges next to a bunch of young ‘uns, well, I think he’s got that covered.

There’s no photos of him online anywhere we could find, and there aren’t too many interviews with Matsumoto in English, but Shueisha’s Jump Plus/Manga Plus site Matsumoto’s editor and Shonen Jump+ Deputy Editor in Chief Sejiro Nakaji, along with a brief Q&A with Matsumoto fairly recently. Go check that out, it’s really interesting.

(Chris’s note: I thought that link was broken but Japan region-locks the MangaPlus website, and I’m in Japan right now. Totally works now that my computer thinks it’s in Canada. Never been more important as a manga fan to have a working VPN…)

Kaiju No. 8 is Matsumoto’s third manga series. Previously, he did a story called Neko Wappa! (ねこわっぱ!) , a 2-volume series about a girl raised by cat gods that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2009, and Pochi Kuro (ポチクロ), a 4-volume rom-com/action series from 2014 about a human girl in the demon realm.

In between series, he was also an assistant on several manga series, including sci-fi action series PSYREN by Toshiaki Iwashiro (available digitally from VIZ Media) and gag manga Shinsetsu Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo by Yoshio Sawai.

According to Nakaji, Matsumoto came up with the concept for Kaiju no. 8, because:

“I think he always wanted to draw a superhero story, but the biggest reason was that his emotions were well reflected in the main character, Kafka.”

He also mentions that the story was influenced by Matsumoto’s interest in tokusatsu shows, e.g. the kind of live-action superhero TV shows like Kamen Rider, a series we discussed back in Episode 47, as well as sci-fi movies like Tron.

When asked about how he designs the monsters in Kaiju No. 8, Matsumoto replied that he “... sometimes draw inspiration from the fantastic monsters and creatures created by predecessors. Additionally, I often use animals, insects, and plants as motifs. I also find inspiration in art and fashion.”

Naoya Matsumoto is on Twitter/X at @ringo_inus

Kaiju No. 8 has already got a season of anime, AND they released a “compilation movie” of the first season that went to theaters, too. Here’s the trailer! It kind of explains what’s going on:

As for that anime you can watch Kaiju No. 8 on Crunchyroll and it was even nominated for the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards for Anime of the Year – not bad! They’ve already announced Season 2 of the anime too.

As for printed material, the spin-offs have already started. VIZ Media has published the light novel, Kaiju No. 8: Exclusive on the Third Division, and the manga side-story series, called Kaiju No. 8: B-Side, which focuses on Hoshina’s backstory, which is written by Matsumoto and Keiji Ando, but drawn by another artist, Kentaro Hidano. Japan has another manga side-story series, Kaiju No,. 8 RELAX, co-created by Matsumoto and Tsuki Watanabe, which is about what the characters get up to in their downtime, a comedy series that isn’t currently slated for publication in English but is up to 3 volumes in Japan.

Safe to say that after two prior attempts at a serialized series, Matsumoto has found something that works, and it works very well.

0:01 Here’s what VIZ Media has to say about Kaiju No. 8:

Kafka hopes to one day keep his pact with his childhood friend Mina to join the Japan Defense Force and fight by her side. But while she’s out neutralizing kaiju as Third Division captain, Kafka is stuck cleaning up the aftermath of her battles. When a sudden rule change makes Kafka eligible for the Defense Force, he decides to try out for the squad once more. There’s just one problem—he’s made the Defense Force’s neutralization list under the code name Kaiju No. 8.

02:28 [DEB] Godzilla is an interesting kaiju – over the course of 70-odd years since this over-sized reptile arose from the sea to terrorize Tokyo, this iconic movie monster has had many incarnations. Sometimes he’s just a monstrous menace to humanity and sometimes, he’s a friendly ally to humans.

And those twin giris who are pals of Mothra? Well, in case that reference left you puzzled, here you go:

02:55 David says he just saw Godzilla vs. Kong: The New Empire. The movie was released in the US on March 29, 2024. Whoof. It has been a year, hasn’t it?

03:50 [CHRIS:] David mentions World Trigger, a Shonen Jump sci-fi/action series by Daisuke Ashihara. I always thought the art on that one looked really good, but I haven’t read it myself. It’s available in print, and if you’ve got a digital Shonen Jump subscription, all of the chapters are up on there to read as well, first 3 are free.

Meanwhile, David also references the “qualifying tournament arc,” or the difficult test/training part of the story that’s often a part of some popular Shonen Jump stories. We’ve previously seen this in our discussions of Naruto and My Hero Academia which we’ve read on the podcast, and much like MHA some of the newer Jump stories are moving those arcs closer and closer to the beginning of the series, as it's a clear hook for readers and a great chance for the characters’ personalities and abilities to be shown off. But then, I’ll talk about that more a little later on the pod.

05:30 Damage Control is a Marvel Comic series about the company that cleans up after the big superhero battles (as Chip says!). It’s a favourite of Chip, David, and myself and we’ve weirdly mentioned it more than once on the podcast.

Apparently there was a Damage Control TV series planned for television, on ABC of all places, but it never got past the pilot stage. Seems like a no-brainer to do The Office but with little superhero cameos in the background. I can’t seem to find a leak of that pilot anywhere though. Ah well, what coulda been.

06:30 Worth noting that with its 30-year old protagonist (who is still younger than all of us on the podcast…) Kaiju No. 8 is part of the “older protagonist boom” in Japan, although 30 isn’t THAT old compared to the “Ojisan” or “uncle-type” characters we’ve seen in other anime/manga. I read an interesting article about this that, of course, I can’t seem to find right now. I still can’t believe they didn’t manage to find a way to make everyone working for this government agency teenagers, like every single other manga. Between this and the bad-ass dad in Sakamoto Days, Shonen Jump might finally be catering to the audience that’s still reading the magazine from decades’ past!

[DEB:] A current release from this “old guy is the hero” trend is From Old Country Bumpkin to Master Swordsman, a fantasy light novel series by Shigeru Sagazaki, illustrated by Tetsuhiro Nabeshima that’s published by J-Novel Club, and a manga version from Yen Press drawn by Kazuki Sato.

Heck, Yen Press even released a vertical scrolling version of this story on WEBTOON this month, that seems like a good indication of faith in the popularity of the series.

The basic premise of this story is this older guy (maybe in his early 40s max!) lives in the countryside, running a sword fighting school with his elderly father. But after years of teaching, one of his former students who is now a high-ranking military officer in the big city enlists him to become a teacher for the kingdom’s defense forces. The anime version is streaming on Amazon Prime:

This fantasy adventure tale ends up being a bit of a harem story, where most of this guy’s former students are cute young women, who besides all being kick-ass, high-ranking, sword-wielding babes, they all kind of have a crush on him… which he seems to be unaware of. ANYWAY.

Another one is Uncle from Another World, which has an anime adaptation now streaming on Netflix. In this tale, a young man’s middle-aged uncle has been in a coma for the past 20 years. The older man awakens, and not only has to catch up with all the modern innovations/changes that have happened in the past two decades, he tells his nephew that he has spent this time in another dimensional fantasy world and now has magic powers to boot.

Of course, the manga is another Yen Press title, so pick it up if you’re intrigued by this premise.

[CHRIS:] I went to the Yen website to grab the cover, and there’s not one cover image with an actual old man on it. Just cute anime girls sort of floating over the sepia-toned backgrounds. This is bullshit. I want my Oji-sans front in center, like in the hit new anime series “Oji-san reincarnated as a Villainess.” And no, I am not joking.

06:45 [DEB:] Chip bemoans that Kafka feels the need to keep his kaiju powers a secret in this first volume, but interestingly, this is similar to something that was mentioned in the interview with Kaiju no. 8 editor Nakaji referenced above. The way the current Kaiju No. 8 story goes was just one of many options considered. As Nakaji describes it, one option was:

“...where Kafka leads a normal life while hiding his true identity, and the other where he pursues his dream even after becoming a monster.”

Ah, the roads not traveled, and all that.

[CHRIS:] The way the story was heading in volume 2, I was kind of hoping it meant that his secret identity, so to speak, would be revealed and he’d just be part of the team. You know, like, X-Men style. But I guess not?

07:45 [CHRIS:] So, in true “me” style, about a day before we were set to record this episode I did tell everyone to read past the end of volume 1, to about Chapter 8 or so, as I don’t think the first volume totally sells the premise. Volume 2 is a lot of fun and has some really good forward plot momentum, the resolution of the training/test arc, and some great character stuff. I think this also happened with Dandadan, which I read as chapters on the Shonen Jump app rather than printed/digital volumes… Just reading until there’s a more natural break in the story, instead of the break where they cut the volume off. Feels like a bit of a better way to read these manga, to me anywaym but I get that leaving Volume 1 ending on a cliffhanger does make some sales sense.

08:50 Chip doesn’t love the art! He references a mistake at the beginning of volume 2 which I honestly couldn’t find when I went to look, but he does talk about the monster designs being “fine” and lacking weight, and I see what he’s getting at in this spread from the first chapter:

10:35 The bonus chapters in the Shonen Jump app feature some gorgeous title pages, color pages too. Here’s a couple examples of some of his better art, including the illustration that would go on to be used on the cover. Click for larger versions:

12:21 “Shonen Jump is a battlefield!” It’s true, if you even manage to make it into Shonen Jump with your series, you’re not just competing with all of the other manga being made, you’re also competing with the other folks in your magazine. Even some huge series with strong recommendations from successful mangaka, or big tie-in properties, can get paid. Most recently, cancelled titles that have upset fans include Astro Royale, by Ken Wakui (creator of Tokyo Revengers), Samurai 8 by Masashi Kishimoto (Naruto), MamaYuyu by (championed by the creators of Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen), and even the manga No|Name by Rafal Jaki, the showrunner and executive producer of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

Just google “Shonen Jump Cancelled” to see the waves of annual articles bemoaning another (seemingly popular) series’ unfair cancellation. It’s… wild.

13:10 [DEB:] Bleach by Tite Kubo was, for a good chunk of its run in Shonen Jump, was considered one of the “Big Three,” or its most popular series. And Chris is right – the art in Bleach Vol. 1 and Vol. 55 are worlds apart. We discuss this a bunch in Episode 93

15:15 Wow, I gave myself a lot of work with this to find an art reference.

So yeah, Humberto Ramos is a Mexican comic book illustrator working primarily in Marvel superheroes. I’m actually a fan of his from 30+ years back on titles like Impulse and Crimson, and that’s why he’s a go-to reference for me. :) Here’s a page from X-Men #202 from a little while back (inked by Carlos Cuevas), and you can see he’s a really dynamic illustrator when his characters are in the foreground, but the characters in the background in that group shot tend to flatten out a bit, and rely on coloring/inking for depth and form. No shade by the way, just who I thought of when talking about that.

Humberto Ramos is an interesting guy! Along with creators who did work for Marvel and DC back in the 90s Like Joe Madeuria and J. Scott Campbell, he was one who was credited with having a “manga-style” of American superhero comics. actually did do a take on manga characters, by the way! Or maybe the anime versions? To celebrate the end of My Hero Academia, Marvel and Jump crossed over with Humberto Ramos providing this pin-up of the Black Cat stealing from the (many) ladies in the MHA universe.

To see the other half, with MHA author Horikoshi-sensei’s take on Spider-Man, head to the Marvel Website.

17:05 [DEB:] Giant Killing is a criminally underrated sports manga about soccer/football! It’s available on almost every digital manga platform/app around, including Kodansha’s K-Manga app, Azuki, Mangamo, AND on ebook stores like BookWalker, Apple iBooks, Kindle, and more. A lot of these digital manga apps offer several chapters of this series to read for free or included with their monthly subscription fee, so give it a go, especially if you too are into stories about characters who are way past their high school days.

18:30 [DEB:] - There really are some cool page turns in this book! Check out this sequence from chapter 1, which features two very good page turns in a row!

19:20 [DEB:] “Dirty Jobs” is the kind of TV show you should watch when you’re thinking, “my job is sh*tty.” It’s both fascinating and humbling to see people do jobs that other people can’t/won’t do, but are essential to keep things runnin’ in this world of ours. It originally aired on The Discovery Channel, but you can also watch it on Netflix. Here’s a clip of “filthiest jobs” from Season 9 of “Dirty Jobs”

20:29 Intestine Duty! No one ever thinks of just what cleaning up these sorts of terrifying events might look like! This is a great introduction to the character.

21:29 [DEB:] One thing I forgot to mention is that Kafka’s monster clean-up experiences also gives him a unique perspective on what the monsters are made of (so to speak) and their unique characteristics and weaknesses. This comes in handy during many battles, so it’s another way that Kafka has unique strengths that don’t just come from him being part kaiju.

22:00 [DEB:] Hanamichi Sakuragi is the red-haired protagonist of Slam Dunk, a seminal basketball manga series (also from Shonen Jump) by Takehiko Inoue. He’s a delinquent who joins the basketball team despite knowing almost nothing about the sport, but coming into it like he’s gonna be a slam-dunkin’ superstar… which he isn’t at first, but that’s what the 31 volumes of this series are for.

Incidentally, we read another basketball manga series by Inoue, Real a few episodes ago, but it was Vol. 13, which was mostly about wrestling. Go listen and you’ll hear what we mean!

22:00 [DEB:] There’s a lot of comedy in this series, particularly Kafka’s silly faces both in and out of monster form.

23:10 We read Space Brothers on Episode 80, in case you’d forgotten.

23:30 [DEB:] There are some competent, kick-ass women in Kaiju No. 8. Childhood friend Mina is a hyper-competent and emotionally vacant commander, and Kikora is a prodigy of a monster-killer.

[CHRIS:] It reminded me a little bit of the dichotomy between the portrayals of Rei and Asuka in Evangelion actually, but I’m not going to get into that here.

25:54 [DEB:] Here we reference the Shonen Jump trope of introducing a strong female character just for the boys reading to hate, which Kaiju No. 8 seems to mostly sidestep. Remember Erina Nakiri, the stuck-up rich girl character from Food Wars? No? Go listen to episode 75, our “first four chapters” episode. There’s also Power, from Chainsaw Man, who we talk about in Episode 85.

[CHRIS:] But perhaps one of the characters who got the biggest glow-up that’s in a “strong and competent woman that readers love to hate” category is Amanda Waller, from the DCU. Waller returned to prominence thanks to the success of the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, where her actions were generally principled, if ideologically opposed to those of the heroes. It was in keeping with her previous comic book portrayals, willing to make tough, possibly morally dubious decisions for a greater good. Her appearances kinda got weird as she started appearing in other media though, unfortunately. But then I’ve been told no one came out of those two Suicide Squad movies particularly well.

28:55 I believe this gif speaks for itself.

29:20 There are a bunch of good female Shonen Jump manga protagonists our there these days. Akane Banashi is a current Shonen Jump series that features a young woman who is striving to become a top rakugo storyteller. And then there’s Momo Ayase from DanDaDan, too!

29:55 Kikoru’s dad’s facial hair is crazy. He’s like a Pokemon gym leader or something.

30:50 SPOILERS FOR ONE PIECE VOLUME 9 - You can skip ahead to 31:20 if you haven’t read One Piece yet and don’t want to hear it.

31:42 ALSO SPOILERS: We still didn’t read One Punch Man yet. We GOTTA read One Punch Man. That scene with Mumen Rider! That “leave the rest to me” moment! There’s so much that makes this great.

I wonder if none of us, David, Deb, or myself, have recommended it because we just couldn’t take the pain if Chip didn’t actually like it…?

34:20 As mentioned up top, the anime did come out and it was huge. Season 2 coming soon.

34:40 [DEB:] 70 years later, and there’s so much Godzilla! Shin Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One, Godzilla: Singular Point. Godzilla: Planet of Monsters… and even Chibi Godzilla!

The Toho Official Godzilla YouTube Channel has all this and much more.

If you count the other related kaiju stories like Gamera: Rebirth (which is on Netflix), there’s definitely some Godzilla renaissance going on – though you could argue Godzilla never really went away.

Also, this is too cute not to share here – “Giant Crush” is an animated short directed by Luke Lee, who is a 3rd year student in Animation at CalArts. It’s part Godzilla, part Pacific Rim with a rom-com twist. Go watch. I promise, it’s worth it!

36:26 Yeah, I think we’re all hoping for someone to come and save us at this point. Well observed, Chipper!

40:20 [DEB:] Akane Torikai’s Saturn Return isn’t yet licensed for English release, but (plug plug), we do have Wandering Cat’s Cage by Akane Torikai serialized on Mangasplaining Extra, months before the print edition will come out from MSX/Fantagraphics.

Look for the print edition in Spring 2026.

Actually Saturn Return, the astrological event, happens around age 29… But anyway, here’s more on the significance of Saturn Return in astrology, from Vogue.

42:06 [CHRIS:] The 27 Club is the idea that a lot of famous people died at 27. The people most often cited are Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, but there’s many many more.

43:30 Yeah, young manga fans can definitely be assholes.

[DEB:] “Oldtaku” – it’s a thing, according to the Urban Dictionary.

[CHRIS:] To be fair, the anime fandom actually loves to shit on itself in a surprising variation of ways, each with their own dumb little term. It’s honestly a little weird.

44:45 There really ARE a lot of hits coming out of Shonen Jump+ instead of Jump, as the readership is aging and want more complex/mature/stories. In addition to Kaiju No. 8 (which at the time of writing this on May 9th was listed as the most popular title on the Jump Plus website), Jump Plus is where you’ll get hit series like Dandadan, Spy X Family, Chainsaw Man, etc., which are all just listed as “Shonen Jump” in North America.

[DEB:] Just to make things a little more confusing, there’s also Manga Plus by Shueisha, which is their online manga site for overseas (non-Japanese) readers, with official versions of these stories in English, French, Vietnamese, Thai, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese. Manga Plus has some of the series that are serialized on VIZ Media’s Shonen Jump app/website, but it also has many series that are exclusive to Manga Plus.

47:10 70% of manga sales in Japan are digital. ICv2 said in 2022, digital’s share of the market in America is 7%. Which was… accurate at time of recording. I actually just went to the ICv2 website and saw that they’re no longer tracking digital manga sales in North America, because of lack of reliable reporting and the extreme fragmentation of the market. It’s really… wild… to hear this actually, because while 7% always seemed very low to me, it also seemed… believably… low. From discussions with pubs AND licensees in Japan. So 7% seems like ICv2 now feels its inaccurate, but can’t offer a guess to what it is.

That said, the ICv2 site has a lot of great info locked behind a paywall, a paywall I happily pay to pass. Go support an important industry resource if you’ve got the means. Info here: https://icv2.com/articles/icv2-pro/view/58114/icv2-white-paper-comic-store-sales-up-2024-audio-deck#

We also get WAY off topic here, talking about the Apple App Store taking an onerous percentage of e-book sales. That’s why you come to the podcast, right? For the long asides?

49:30 Shout out to BookWalker’s global store, it’s good! The app is honestly terrible, I’ve never been able to use it without it crashing my iPad, but the web interface is pretty good.

International: https://global.bookwalker.jp/
Japan: https://bookwalker.jp/

54:17 David liked it! He loves the old man reacting to Kaiju-form Kafka as one of his fave bits of comedy:

He also mentions really loving the sequence where Kafka saves Reno from getting eaten, which I used up top as an example of really good page-turns in this book. But he also specifically liked the power of this jaw-snapping second bite on the other half of the spread that I didn’t show you! Which you can find here:

56:53 On Page 105, we get a hilarious reaction-shot gag, full page, of monster-form Kafka eating a piece of sushi that was again, a great example of a page-turn making a gag really land.

57:59 This manga also had some great, unexpected use of color with the Blood Rain, but we’re getting into the territory of showing a LOT of images here, so maybe go check out this one for yourself, as the first three chapters are free on the Shonen Jump website.

58:37 That said, we gotta make space for Little Brothers, with David mentioning the excellent detail of Kiroko shrugging off the top sleeve of her dress in order not to damage it, being a really good example of character acting in manga.

1:01:20 Shout-out to HOME ROOM in Oakland. All mac n’ cheese, all the time.

1:01:45 Hating on shirtless Doc Ock is ridiculous. Total sex symbol.

1:02:10 COMPETENT!!!! That about sums up Kaiju No. 8, and this episode of Mangasplaining! Haha, no I kid, a fun time was had. :) Stay tuned after the break as we make a bunch of good shout-outs.

01:02:49 THE BREAK!!!

01:03:02 TIME FOR SHOUT OUTS

David Shouts out MM9 by Hiroshi Yamamoto, translated by Nathan Collins, published by VIZ/Haikasoru.

Chris (me!) shouts out Florent Chavouet, creator of Tokyo on Foot. He also did a follow-up called Manabeshima about what it’s like to live on one of the many small islands off the coast of Japan, which is a carnet de voyage and I love it. His Louvre book is L’ile Louvre, and unfortunately it was never translated into English. We will release the interview with him soon, still editing it (I know, I know). But for now you can view a preview of the book on its page on Amazon.

Deb shouts-out the new Kodansha manga Versus, by ONE (One Punch Man), and drawn by Azuma Kyoutarou. I’ve also read this since the podcast and the first volume is really good. Double-recommendation. Deb mentions that she read it on KManga but as of May 2025, there’s now 3 volumes of Versus out in print/digital from Kodansha USA!

In talking about this title, Chip mentioned that it sounded like the 1990s Marvel crossover “Acts of Vengeance,” where all the Marvel villains decide to switch good guys to fight. It was a pretty wild crossover, but my fav story was in Captain America where Magneto just decides to take out the Red Skull. Chip loved the incredible cover where Daredevil has to fight Ultron. Both worth tracking down on whatever digital apps they might be on.

David mentions the excellent Japanese gangster horror movie VERSUS. Highly recommended, and completely insane.

I kind of love that this trailer is incredibly cool, and yet also doesn’t spoil the movie or even tell you what the hell is going on. Treat yourself.

Chip shouts-out the movie Problemista by Julio Torres, which is probably a very different vibe to Versus. To either of the Versus’s.

And that’s this week in Mangasplaining! This episode is also available wherever you get your podcasts, so please subscribe and leave a review, so others can discover our show.

Also, if you’re a Mangasplaining Extra subscriber, thank you! This is all possible because of your support. If you’re a free subscriber, please consider upgrading your subscription. :)

Next week on Mangasplaining:
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Thanks so much for listening! Please support your local comic and manga specialty shop when purchasing these books, and you can find one near you at comicshoplocator.com. You can also check your local library for print and digital lending options, they have TONS of manga! Finally, thanks to D.A.D.S. for their musical accompaniment for this episode.

Hello, and welcome back to Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy Volume 3, based on the manga Dororo by Osamu Tezuka. This is the second chapter of volume 3, and this post for paid subscribers to Mangasplaining Extra, with CBZs and PDFs of this chapter at the end. Everyone else, please enjoy these few preview pages or the free chapters available below:

Search and Destroy Previous Chapters:
Volume One: Introduction (Free) | 00-01 (Free) | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 |
Volume Two: 07 (Free) | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12
Volume Three: 13 (Free)

This chapter is full of spoilers about who Doro really is, and we HIGHLY recommend not jumping in here. Working on this last volume of Search and Destroy was really something else, seeing all of the disparate threads get woven together into an incredible conclusion is something else. We hope you enjoy the ride. The remaining chapters of this volume will be released every-other-week beginning today.

Search and Destroy Volume 1 is currently available in Print from our partners at Fantagraphics, and you can pre-order Volume 2 (June 2025) & Volume 3 (September 2025) at retailers everywhere.

Buy Search and Destroy Volume 1: Fantagraphics | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Pre-order Search and Destroy Volume 2: Fantagraphics | Amazon | B&N
Pre-order Search and Destroy Volume 3: Fantagraphics | Amazon | B&N

Search and Destroy - Chapter 14

By Atsushi Kaneko, based on the story Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
Translated by Ben Applegate, Lettered by Phil Christie.
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Guardians of the Louvre
By Jiro Taniguchi

Translated by: Kumar Sivasubramanian
Lettering by: Ill Wind Tidings
Published by: NBM Graphic Novels
Out of print (put not completely impossible to find). Was available digitally but is no longer so? If you google the title and “Archive.org” though…

Audio editing by David Brothers. Show notes by Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and Deb Aoki

Recorded in February 2024. Yes, a year ago. It’s been a tough year.

BEFORE WE GET STARTED

Hey y’all, Christopher here. Nice to be back. Best laid plans, yadda yadda yadda. I hate sharing with the public these days, but long story short, lotta tragedy in my family last year and man it made it hard to focus on creative pursuits like this incredible podcast! What a hard time it is now to make things. But still, we’re recording and editing episodes and hopefully, hopefully, we’re about to start posting those episodes regularly again. We’re a year behind, but we’ll catch up soon. Thanks for sticking with us.

So we covered Jiro Taniguchi way back in Season 1 with one of our favourite picks of all time, A Journal of My Father. He’s easily one of my favorite cartoonists of all time, and I share a bit of a story about that at the end of this episode. In fact we all really dig his work now, and I kind of want to see about recommending another of his books next season. Hopefully something in print, next time? Because, and I’m SO SORRY, but this was available digitally when we recorded this, but has subsequently disappeared from digital services. It’s still in my Kindle account, but you can’t buy it anymore.

[DEB] Stephen Robson, the UK-based publisher at Fanfare Ponent Mon has assured us that he’s working on his next Taniguchi release, Solitary Gourmet and hopefully will have it out sometime soon. It’s a book that’s right up our alley, as it’s about an older office worker who finds pleasure in finding diners where he can enjoy tasty and inexpensive meals alone.

It’s been adapted into a very successful live-action TV series that is unfortunately, not yet available subtitled in English on Netflix, etc. Maybe someday soon. I watched it on a recent flight on Japan Airlines, and hope more people in the English-speaking world get to enjoy this little gem.

[Christopher:] Taniguchi is a bit strange, in that he’s the rare manga creator that we’ve covered who, while he is successful and respected in Japan, is perhaps even more successful and respected in France and throughout Europe. He has a career that is marked not only by a vast amount of work across a variety of genres, but also that work is almost entirely also available in French, usually in quite lush and impressive editions. That makes this particular work, his first to be produced initially for the European market and then translated back into Japanese, again a true rarity in manga publishing. There are even some purists out there who might not consider this manga, as Japan wasn’t its country of first production… It’s an interesting episode and an interesting discussion!

[DEB] Right now, there are two exhibits about manga in the US featuring Jiro Taniguchi manga planned for 2025. The Asian Comics exhibit, curated by Paul Gravett and the Barbican is now up at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, after a 2024 stint at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California.

In late September 2025, Jiro Taniguchi will be one of eight featured manga artists in The Art of Manga exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. I hope these two shows will help build appreciation of Jiro Taniguchi’s manga.

ABOUT JIRO TANIGUCHI

Jiro Taniguchi (1947-2017) is the author of dozens of manga, and is somewhat surprisingly extensively translated into English. His work is all technically classified as “seinen” (adult male) manga, but his work tended to be serialized in older seinen manga magazines (sometimes ‘salaryman’ manga magazines), with the protagonists typically in their 30s, or older. This makes his work a little different than what usually gets translated here in North America.

Taniguchi’s manga spans genres, from manly-man stories of survival on the frontier, to historical fiction, to gentle meditations on life, family, and the world around us. Taniguchi-sensei is even more popular in France, where everything he’s made (give or take) has been translated into French for that market.

Taniguchi made his debut in Japan in 1979 with the work Lindo 3!. He continued working through the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. His work in English is primarily translated and published by the UK-based publisher Fanfare/Ponent-Mon, a true passion project on their part. They are a bit smaller as publishers go, and their output doesn’t get quite as widely distributed as some of the major pubs. Maybe folks won’t be quite as familiar with his work because of that. These books are all available though, on ‘online booksellers’ if not from actual great stores. It’s worth noting that Taniguchi’s lead characters tend to look sort of similar, sort of an everyman/salaryman for the reader to project themselves onto.

Now I’m not gonna lie, we went DEEP on Jiro Taniguchi during our first episode featuring his work, and we also recorded one of our best episodes there too. I highly recommend going and reading the show notes for that episode if you haven’t already, and give it a listen too! It’s a good episode, before we started the Substack here, a great book, and some of my best show notes.

https://www.mangasplaining.com/blog/ep-22-a-journal-of-my-father/

3:40 Shout out to library apps like Hoopla! They have all kinds of manga you can read for free with a library card. For real! You just login with your library card to your local library site, and they’ve got digital lending options. Almost all digital lenders have some amount of comics and manga to read, and it’s all legit and above board. Other digital lenders include ComicsPlus and Overdrive. Getting your digital manga fix from these services feels a hell of a lot better than supporting Amazon these days.

4:20 [DEB] Here’s a photo from our trip to the Louvre that Christopher mentioned, and here’s the line to see the Mona Lisa up close. It’s behind a glass enclosure because it’s been targeted by activists and thieves over the years.

And even once you get to the front of the line, you can’t get very close to this famous painting, as there are barriers to keep the crowds a safe distance from it.

Why are these measures in place? Lots of reasons. For one, in 2024, environmental activists rushed up and splattered the Mona Lisa with pumpkin soup. Guh? Vanity Fair has more on this particular incident. It was just the latest of many incidents that use the iconic status of this painting to make headlines.

5:30: [Christopher:] Before starting this episode, I thought of Guardians of the Louvre as Taniguchi’s weakest work, and maybe the least favorite of the Louvre books that I’ve read. I’ll spoil the episode and say that the book has grown on me quite a bit for what it does really well, like the gorgeous artwork and some of the history, but I still just do not like the story.

6:45 I want to talk about Jiro Taniguchi’s Venice book for a moment…

Venice, a travelogue sponsored and published by Louis Vuitton’s extensive high-end publishing arm (I am serious) is Jiro Taniguchi going to Venice and painting the scenery, showing the beauty of the city. It is a beautiful, stunning book, and it features the loosest possible story, where the gentleman you see on the cover sort of meanders through the city. There are pages with panels and those with full-page illustrations, and the occasional caption. It’s amazing, I love it. I’d strongly recommend it (might be out of print…).

For a preview to see what I’m talking about, check out this guy Parka Blogs, he’s probably the best art book reviewer guy out there.

10:09

“This might be the greatest sponsored comic of all time.”
-Chip Zdarsky

10:15 Chip went HARDCORE Canadian with that reference to Spider-Man Visits the Calgary Stampede. I can’t imagine that most non-Canadian listeners have ever heard of this incredibly-popular-in-Canada Spider-Man comic book, the fourth in a series of freebie comics featuring the wallcrawler that were distributed to schools, from cops, and sort of public services.

And DC Comics’s Subway “Famous Fans” comics, featuring criminal sandwich spokesman, Jared.

And then Marvel one-upped them with a sponsored comic with Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor.

[DEB] This did not go very far, as some fans were not keen to have their favorite costumed heroes associated with a company that creates weapons and technology for war, uhr… “defense purposes.” Variety has the low-down on this whole kerfuffle.

[Christopher:] It’d be like if DC did that Jared comic, but now instead of before the shoe dropped, y’know? Unreal.

13:46 The Monuments Men, a 2014 film with Matt Damon and George Clooney as part of a band of scholars and soldiers who worked to retrieve stolen works of art from the Nazis.

GQ has this overview of the real paintings that were the subject of this WWII movie, and The Smithsonian has photos and the story of the real art heroes that inspired this movie.

[Christopher:] FWIW I never did check out this movie in the last year, but the trailer looks great, if this sounded interesting to you:

15:00 This bit of foreshadowing which has Vincent Van Gogh drop his gun is pretty good.

17:50 One of the most interesting publishing projects from any manga publisher, honestly, is Pepita: Inoue meets Gaudi (VIZ Media, 2013). Slam Dunk and Real and Vagabond creator Takehiko Inoue heads to Spain and draws his way through the creations of architect Antonio Gaudi. It’s a stunning book, but very strange for most manga fans and even, I’d argue, most Inoue fans. It didn’t do very well! You can usually find it in discount bins across the country, and it’s absolutely worth a flip.

19:10 It isn’t widely discussed, but Jiro Taniguchi died after his travel to France where he was the guest of honor at the Angouleme Festival in 2017. Knowing how difficult travel is on people, especially people of advanced years (Taniguchi was 69), it’s a tough thing. He received one of the highest honors of his career at the show, and the exhibition of his work there was truly tremendous. I know he felt really honored and good, there’s lots of news stories about his appearance there. Yeah, it makes me feel really… complicated… about shows these days. That and you know, the unsolved pandemic situation.

[Deb:] Here’s Zack Davission’s obituary for Jiro Taniguchi from The Comics Journal.

20:30 Wow, that’s one of Chip’s worst color corners, in my ever-humble opinion. So what say you folks, is this not painted? Sound off in the comments.

21:00 Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and how it was depicted in Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon (Vertigo / DC Comics).

24:11 There are so many Louvre books, actually. Cats of the Louvre, Rohan at the Louvre, and The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert by Marc Antoine Matthieu. Most of these books were published in English by NBM Graphic Novels, except for Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto, and Mujirishi by Naoki Urasawa, which were both published by VIZ Media.

For a complete (I think) list of all of the Louvre books, check out this page on the Futuropolis website, as they are the co-publishers of the Louvre collections alongside the actual… Louvre… museum.

I kinda wanna start a podcast where we just review these particular books. Lol.

26:20 Deb really loved this scene where The Raft of the Medusa was being hidden from the Nazis.

[DEB] How big is The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault? REALLY BIG.

29:00 In the “Amor Fou” episode of The Sopranos, Carmela sees Jusepe de Ribera's painting "The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria", a painting of a baby and child at the Brooklyn Museum, and starts crying. FORESHADOWING.

[DEB] Cameron sees A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat at the Chicago Art Institute in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The Art Crimes podcast goes into this movie meets art moment in their insightful post about this scene.

[Christopher:] One of the cool things I’ve learned from doing these show notes is just how many works of art are in the public domain, and feature extremely hi-res scans/photos online. You can download a great scan from the Chicago Art Institute Website, for instance. Archive.org has one too!

How big is Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh? Surprisingly small! See it at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and you’ll see what we mean.

[DEB] Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple) by Eugène Delacroix is huge. This is in the Louvre and is awe-inspiring to see in person.

31:00 Go to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam! It’s actually awesome, even though it’s full of tourists and is difficult to get tickets. The number of Van Goghs, the history, and getting to see original art! It rules! Visit museums when you travel and see art.

Oh, and the Rjiksmuseum was pretty great too.

32:00 Shintoism is pretty well documented. You really don’t need me to abstract it, heh. Here’s a link to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto

35:30 I love that Winged Victory is fed up with tourists. It’s hilarious.

I really loved seeing Winged Victory in the Louvre! It’s so powerful, especially where it’s placed. I know it’s dumb, but also, did you know that the Louvre holds a LOT of the artwork that you can get in Animal Crossing? It was kinda… neat… getting to see it all in person.

38:14 David fucking ruled. I mean, both David’s rule, don’t get me wrong, and I look forward to the very large statue of our very own David Brothers one day.

[DEB] David by Michelangelo is 17 feet tall. Go to the Opera del Duomo Museum in Florence, Italy and you can see it for yourself!

It’s worth noting, too, that if you’re like, against paying to go into that museum/workshop for whatever reason, there is a near-perfect replica out in the public square that you can see for free, alongside a ton of other amazing statues too.

40:30 Our David’s stand out page 74 with Van Gogh’s sketch of his work.

I really dug the page after, which follows and shows him mentally colouring in the painting…

41:40 In the end, we left this in—maybe there are some lettering errors in this on page 74. The dangers of hiring a designer or letterer who doesn’t have a specific knowledge of how comic books work is there, and this is a problem that runs through the whole book once you see it the first time.

That underlined “you” there… not to mention the kerning on “Afflicted” is a little tight too, almost at a AFFUCTED situation.

43:15 Yeah, no getting around it. The Kindle edition is low-resolution and a little strange all over, and isn’t set up to read in the Japanese reading orientation. The digital version is definitely a lesser experience than the print, and I honestly wonder if that colored Chip’s opinion a little. NBM, it would be great if you could fix the digital edition.

[Christopher in 2025:] Haha, I guess they fixed this by… removing it from all ebook services? Dang, extreme. No seriously it’s probably a licensing issue seeing as how it still seems like NBM has a functioning website and is still publishing comics. I’m just glad Amazon didn’t pull it from all of our libraries. :-/ It kinda sucks that your best bet at buying books while living/traveling abroad is also like… an objectively awful company? Remember, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.

44:30 Chip felt that the actual guardians themselves were portrayed in a pretty underwhelming sort of way in Guardians of the Louvre. I think the cover, with the weird green jelly situation, would’ve tipped me off but yeah, I wasn’t exactly awed. It’s a bit more slimer from ghostbusters than majestic spirit, but YMMV.

46:44 I really needed a soda at the Louvre. I am glad I got one, although really water probably woulda been better.

Hey do you know about Stendhal Sydrome, or Florence Syndrome? Wikipedia calls it “a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, confusion, hallucinations, and even fainting, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty.” My friend experiences this sometimes, when encountering museums or galleries or brilliant works of art, he just breaks down crying, even sobbing sometimes. It’s a real thing! For me it usually manifests itself as extreme exhaustion, like I just ran a marathon or something but it’s like… a mental marathon. I’ve only cried a few times. :)

Anyway, I got my Coke™ and then I was okay again. The Louvre: It’s a lot!

48:24 So yeah, I got to see originals for this work and Taniguchi’s Venice more than once, in Anglouleme and at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo (which was mostly Venice but they had some of his other work under glass I believe, though it’s been 10 years). I don’t have any good photos handy, they’re all one my old backups from before I switched to Google Photos, so nothing to show you except this one shot of the Tokyo exhibition:

50:40 Ah my bad, I could only track down two editions in French: The original graphic album, and then the same work but in Black and White. I had sworn there was a deluxe oversized edition, possibly with a slipcase? But I can’t seem to find it online anymore.

But as an aside: The Black and White edition is INSANE to me. It’s a book that is, despite Chip’s opinion, a fully painted and full color work. The black and white is just those same painted pages, but in black and white. It’s not like they separated the linework out or did heavy half-tones or something:

I… do not understand this choice whatsoever.

51:18 Heist stuff aside, please let me introduce you to Canada’s sketch troupe and their television show, The Kids in the Hall, and their “timeless” sketch “Big in France.”

And no, “Le Poupee” doesn’t exactly mean “The Poupee” although that’s an A+ joke. It sort of means “The Doll” and it’s actually the name of a famous opera. There’s a lot of… layers… to this joke and the more that I talk about it the more I’m like, ruining it, so I’m just gonna shut up now.

56:00 So yeah, I was treated very kindly by someone I just met, and it’s a lesson that has stayed with me since… Especially moving to a new country and meeting so many new people every week. My sincere thanks and admiration to the proprietor of Maison Petit Renard, Thibaud, for his kindness. And the Venice Portfolio book really is gorgeous.

Also, the document I got from Maison Petit Renard is the exhibition catalogue from the show “SGUARDI INCROCIATI A VENEZIA. Jiro Taniguchi Mariano Fortuny.” A website from the show is archived here online. It pairs Taniguchi’s illustrations of Venice with photographs of the city by Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949). I actually can’t find one for sale online if I’ve piqued your interest, I actually feel bad a little bad about mentioning it now that I know they’re somewhat rare. Please don’t harass the owner of Maison Petit Renard?

Here’s an image of the porfolio next to the actual Venice book, for those wondering:

Oh, and the title I bought is Brecht Evens’ Paris Travelogue book, also part of the Louis Vuitton travelogues line, which is, as you might imagine, gorgeous.

I don’t believe there’s a mass-market version of this one like there is for some of the others, but it’s still for sale on the Louis Vuitton site.

If you want to read some of Brecht’s work, he’s primarily published in English by Drawn & Quarterly. I recommend starting with The Wrong Place, it’s the first of his that I read and is maybe his most accessible, but they’re all good and I recommend checking out his stuff.

But this isn’t shout-outs, yet! This is still a podcast about Manga! Let’s head to the break.

59:32 THE BREAK

SHOUT OUTS!

Chip Shouts Out The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.

Deb shouts out Pride and Panels, a newish comics festival at the San Francisco Public Library co-presented by California College of the Arts and indy publisher Silver Sprocket.

And Kyla Aiko, who is lettering No Roses Without Thorns, one of our upcoming MSX-Udon Entertainment co-publishing projects. You can see some of her self-published comics on her website, including this one, “What Could Have Been.”

Christopher has some enlightened-self-interest this episode and shouts out Wandering Cat’s Cage by Akane Torikai. It was also serialized here on Substack and the first chapter is available to read for free! Go check it out now.

David Shouts Out The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA).

He also shouts out the cheap little Taschen “Basic Art” books to learn about a whole artist.

And that’s this week in Mangasplaining! This episode is also available wherever you get your podcasts, so please subscribe and leave a review, so others can discover our show.

Also, if you’re a Mangasplaining Extra subscriber, thank you! This is all possible because of your support. If you’re a free subscriber, please consider upgrading your subscription, so you can get exclusive access to our manga Search and Destroy, Wandering Cat’s Cage, and more original content that’s only for our subscribers!

Next time on Mangasplaining:

Get ready for us to take on the “just another day at the office… with MONSTERS” manga, Kaiju No. 8 vol. 1 by Naoya Matsumoto from VIZ Media.

Thanks so much for listening! Please support your local comic and manga specialty shop when purchasing these books, and you can find one near you at comicshoplocator.com. You can also check your local library for print and digital lending options, they have TONS of manga! Finally, thanks to D.A.D.S.for their musical accompaniment for this episode.

This classic boxing manga (and so much more!) has been one of the podcast’s white whales for years, and on December 24, the first volume will be released to the world! Is it everything we’ve dreamed of? Listen and find out!

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Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow Volume 1
Written by Asao Takamori
Art by Tetsuya Chiba
Translated by Asa Yoneda
Edited by Daniel Joseph
Production by Risa Cho and Pei Ann Yeap
Lettered by Evan Hayden
Proofreading by Kevin Luo

Published by Kodansha Inc. (Print/Digital)

Read the complete first chapter for free at Kodansha.us!

Audio editing by David Brothers. Show notes by Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and Deb Aoki

Before We Get Started, This is a Sponsored Episode:

Christopher here. Long-time listeners of Mangasplaining will know that Ashita no Joe, alongside fellow boxing manga Hajime no Ippo and fighting manga Baki The Grappler are sort of our white-whales–of-manga, titles that we have hoped since the inception of the podcast to be able to read and to cover. [NOTE: We did discuss New Grappler Baki back in Episode 90, tho that’s not the first Baki series. Go listen to that episode to get the backstory on that!]

When Kodansha announced that they had secured the license for Ashita no Joe, we were thrilled! When they reached out to us and asked if they could sponsor this episode of Mangasplaining in order to get our episode out into the world closer to its December 24th, 2024 release date? That was an easy “Yes” from the whole team. So yeah, sponsored episode! They sent us all books too, which is nice. Take everything we say with as many grains of salt as you need to, but we first talked about this title on episode 12, we really have been waiting for it for a long time. Let’s see if it lives up to its legend!

Also, because this was based on a pre-release edition of the book, we got some stuff wrong about what the final book actually looks like and how it’s formatted, and we couldn’t exactly edit it out because of how it appears in the episode. So, for the record:

Ashita No Joe is a 6.25” x 8.25” hardcover weighing in at 580 pages. It collects material from the first 3 (of 20) volumes of Ashita no Joe. It is US$59.99 for the hardcover edition, and US$19.99 for the digital edition. Digital and print are both released in English on December 24th, 2024. Visit kodansha.us for buying options.

Thank you to Kodansha for providing copies of the book, and their support of the podcast!

About Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow:

Kodansha has this to say about Ashita no Joe, from the book’s back-cover copy.

WE ALL NEED SOMETHING TO FIGHT FOR!

A young street-fighting drifter named Joe Yabuki wanders aimlessly through the slums of Tokyo, but a chance encounter with a failed boxer who sees something special in the boy sparks a partnership that might just take Joe all the way to the top …

This universally acclaimed classic is much more than a sports manga: it is a cultural touchstone and a realistic masterpiece, perhaps the most prominent series ever to eschew any hint of the superhuman or supernatural, yielding a keenly observed human drama that captured the hearts of an entire generation on its way to becoming a runaway bestseller. Serialized from 1968-1973, Ashita no Joe made a particular impact on college students and the working class, who saw their own experience reflected in Joe's struggle. To this day, it remains one of the most important manga ever published, and this landmark omnibus edition marks its first appearance in English translation.

Hitmaker Asao Takamori was arguably the biggest manga author of his day, while Tetsuya Chiba, winner of innumerable awards, remains one of the most influential manga artists of all time.

SPOILERS for this episode: We thoroughly spoil the first volume, but don’t talk about the bigger plot points for the series.

1:30 Ashita no Joe originally ran from 1968 to 1973 in Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine, and has been compiled into 20 volumes. Launched as a weekly magazine by Kodansha in 1959, Weekly Shonen Magazine is generally regarded in Japan as a bit edgier, and a bit weirder, than Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, which debuted almost a decade later, in 1968. Reading this series, I can believe the “Weekly Shonen is weirder” rep.

This edition of Ashita no Joe is taken from the kanzenban or “high grade” edition, as Kodansha calls it, which runs 8 volumes. So about 2.5 volumes of content are in each volume, though from what I can tell from the Kodansha USA edition, their volume 1 contains almost the first 3 volumes of the original Japanese series. This may seem like a lot, but this series is a real page-turner, and I could see myself getting to the end of it no problem.

02:22 It’s hard to overstate just how culturally relevant Ashita no Joe is in Japan, and moreover for a 60+ year old property, how much it remains relevant. While manga that’s even remotely popular rarely stays out of print for long in Japan (and the rich depth of user book stores ensures most tankobon remain relatively easy to find…), Ashita no Joe has enjoyed being thoroughly in print (with a small blip…) since it was released, including in multiple editions at various levels of luxuriousness and affordability. Moreover, as David and Deb point out, the story is constantly the subject of revivals and adaptations, in animated TV series’, animated films, live action films, and so much more.

We should also note that the Ashita no Joe anime actually aired on TV in the Spanish-speaking world in the 1970s, so Joe, aka “Rocky Joe,” is actually a beloved character around the world. David even picked up the really nice upscale Spanish release of volume 1 a couple years back, before this edition was announced.

[DEB:] The original “Tomorrow’s Joe” animated series is streaming (legally! officially! with English subs!) on TMS’s YouTube channel. Go watch an episode or two, for even more of that Showa-era fighting drama flavor

But all of that is a drop in the bucket compared to Joe’s continued physical presence in Japan. This iconic illustration of Joe featured heavily in a Uniqlo t-shirt line (and a whole specialty line of shirts featuring the character), and also can be found as statues dotted across the bars of drinking areas across the country.

[DEB:] The scene of Joe bowing his head with a faint smile after a fateful match is so iconic, it’s often seen as a visual meme in webtoons and manga — symbolizing a moment when a character is just so worn out by circumstances, absurdity of the plot, work burnout, you name it. Here’s one that I’ve saved in my webtoon memes album.

[DEB:] Also, I got to see the actual original manga page from this scene from Ashita no Joe at the British Museum’s Manga exhibit back in 2018, and was surprised to see that it was torn and a bit raggedy around the edges. For such a major artifact of manga history to be found in this condition was… well, it was humbling, that’s for sure.

02:45 We’ve only lightly touched on the Japanese student movement in the 1960s and 1970s here on the podcast, but it was a time of incredible social change. Ashita no Joe, with its story of a plucky underdog fighting against an obviously corrupt and unequal system, was a touchstone work for both young people and college age readers at the time. It really was a counter-cultural manga, not unlike Marvel Comics in the 1960s (and Chip mentions in a moment) but far more radical in my opinion. It, alongside Sanpei Shirato’s even more radical Legend of Kamui, were what the cool kids (Mishima!?) were reading when they were reading manga.

[DEB:] Coincidentally, the first volume of Legend of Kamui is available in January 2025 from Drawn & Quarterly. I have a feeling we’ll be talking about this one very soon too.

Someone better-read than me could probably draw a line between the two titles, where the writers of both titles obscured the anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian natures of them with euphemistic dressing, like historical ninja fiction or the very specific language of plucky shonen comics. Maybe throw Barefoot Gen in there too…

REF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968%E2%80%931969_Japanese_university_protests

Also worth noting that the only time I’ve seen the student movement and protests depicted in print is in Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Drifting Life, which is sadly between printings right now. But if you can find a copy, grab one. :)

Oh, just noticed a little something for the counterculture. On page 180, Joe specifically references the actor/comedian/singer Hitoshi Ueki (1927-2007), with his song “Mr. Irresponsible” from a similarly named film from 1962.

Hitoshi Ueki was in Kurosawa’s Ran, he was a big hit actor in his day. It’s interesting to see this very specific reference to an actor and song from a time and place make an appearance. The song is fantastic too, it sounds like cinematic music from the time:

4:30 Yeah, sorry I was indelicate here, but wow, this character. Shonen manga has a history of introducing female characters to be hated by the primarily boy-focused readership, and whoo-boy, is the introduction of Yoko Shiraki at the beginning of volume 2 (page 227) a great example of that. Smiling while she says he’ll be sent to the reformatory, unnerving Joe in the courtroom, and then all of the… bits… where she whips an old man until he bleeds (more on that later). She is not… very likeable at this point of the story. We find out more about her towards the end of this first volume.

6:30 Yes it’s true, boxing prodigy and very muscled Joe is only 15 years old! Just a little older than the average readers of Weekly Shonen (typically boys, age 9-13), teenage Joe is framed as an aspirational figure for readers. It kind of does and doesn’t come across in this book. Being 15 used to be a lot older than it is now.

8:13 I think Deb’s points are really salient, people today have very fixed ideas of what Japan is like. It’s only a much older generation that thinks of (or knows) Japan as something other than the gleaming technological future (and vacation destination for most of the world…) that it is today. Things weren’t great after the war for most Japanese people, for at least 30 years after the war ended, and even after the American Occupation of Japan ended in 1952. The post-war rebuilding went on for a long, long time. While Japan undeniably rapidly transformed into a modern, industrialized society, the post-war economic miracle definitely missed a few people, and we see them in this book.

[DEB:} On a recent trip to Japan, I picked up this interesting book —”Tomorrow’s Joe Holy Land Book” ( Japanese title あしたのお嬢 ~あしたのジョー 聖地巡り~ if you want to order it from your favorite Japanese bookseller). It’s a manga starring the characters of Ashita no Joe taking a modern day girl on a tour of the real places depicted in the manga series, showing how they looked then and how they look today. It’s only in Japanese, but if you’re a fan of manga history, go check it out.

10:04 We should probably talk a little bit about Tetsuya Chiba and Asao Takamori a.k.a. Ikki Kajiwara here, as creators of this book.

About Asao Takamori

First up, Asao Takamori (1936-1987) is actually Asaki Takamori, with Asao one of his pen names. His other, and the one for which he is much more popularly known (including being referenced by Deb here) is Ikki Kajiwara, with these various pen names being used due to writing for rival magazines at the same time(!).

A writer and film producer, Kajiwara is probably the most popular sports-manga author of the Showa era, between his work here on Ashita no Joe, as well as the genre-defining baseball manga Star of the Giants (Kyojin no Hoshi) with Noboru Kawasaki, and wrestling manga Tiger Mask with Junichi Miyata, not to mention popular judo and karate manga, two disciplines for which he received black belts himself.

Of course, like Ashita no Joe none of those titles have never been formally translated into English, nor has the rest of Takamori’s oeuvre. It’s hard to overstate, but no one who has done a boxing, wrestling, or baseball manga since the 1960s has done it without being in the shadow of Takamori, aka Kajiwara.

Takamori’s personal life was also fascinating and sketchy, with his Japanese Wikipedia entry describing him as having “an unconventional and bold lifestyle” and “numerous scandals.” If you look at that picture up top I think you’ll put together what that means.

In 1975 he formed a film production company, and spent much of the end of his life working as a film producer, working on adaptations of his own manga, documentaries, and literary works. He even worked with Seijun Suzuki on “A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness.” The scandals he was involved with (seriously, read his Japanese Wiki page, it’s insane) led to a sort of 1970s and 1980s style shadow-banning of him and his work, not to mention jail-time, with many of his titles removed from print and sale due to moral panic. He’s subsequently been “re-evaluated” by artistic society, and his work is once again held in the esteem it previously enjoyed.

But really, check out this trailer for “A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness,” by David’s recent fav Seijun Suzuki, it’s absolutely wild.

About Tetsuya Chiba

Moving on, Takamori’s collaborator on Ashita no Joe, Tetsuya Chiba (1939-), is no less a legend of manga creation. While Ashita no Joe is easily the most important manga of his career, Chiba has remained a prolific creator for decades, with a number of hits under his belt including the incredible sumo wrestling manga Notari Matsutaro.

Chiba is still with us today, and in addition to being the first artist to ever be nominated as a member to the Japan Art Academy (alongside Yoshiharu Tsuge), Chiba has also received the Japanese Order of Culture (the first manga artist to receive the honor) this year in 2024.

Chiba is interesting because for much of his career, he created both shonen and shojo manga simultaneously. In fact, in 2016 he undertook a crowdfunding effort to turn one of his 1960s shojo one shots, Kaze no Yo ni, into an animated film. It was successful, and you can see the Japanese language trailer here, complete with some familiar character designs.

Chiba is also fascinating because like Takamori, his shadow looms large over sports manga. His work includes not just boxing and sumo stories, but he also worked with Takamori on the Young Giants spin-off of Star of the Giants baseball manga, alongside sports titles themed with tennis, golf, soccer, karate, and a variety of romance stories, war stories, coming of age stories, and more. His current works (he’s still work at 85 years old!) are autobiographical, short stories (published in full color!) about his early life, time during the war, his time as a manga creator, really its the kind of career we don’t see a lot of in North America.

While these stories have been translated into many languages so far, no one has been willing or able to pick up the English license as of yet. It’s a shame too, because they’re really good and interesting gentle historical manga. Maybe the publication of Ashita no Joe will get the ball rolling!

10:12 It’s kind of wild to think about, but as we mentioned on our Manga! Manga! Episode, It’s true, it’s been 40 years since the very first readers (in English) of Manga! Manga! got their first taste of Ashita no Joe. And that was nearly 20 years after the series started serializing! You coulda learned Japanese in all that time and read it in the original language…!

11:17 Actually at 582 pages, it’s almost 3 volumes.

14:17 One of the best gags of the book is Joe staging a fake photo shoot after robbing a pachinko (gambling) parlour, with photographers to show he’s “Looking out for our most vulnerable children” to build his image. This spurs a massive donation of money to him for his “work.” If that’s not a clear shot at the hypocrisy of the ruling class, I don’t know what is.

16:31 In addition to the direct anime adaptations of Ashita no Joe we mentioned above, there was this very well-received anime reimagining of the series, Megalobox. That first line in the trailer is killer too, with “There’s no tomorrow for folks like us.” which is… the antithesis of today’s manga. David vouches for this one being good, I’d check it out! It looks good.

As Deb mentions (and handily posted on Twitter!), the series features a cameo between Ashita no Joe’s creators Takamori (as he looked at the end of his life) and Chiba (as he looks today).

19:15 So yeah, the classic manga trope of the “bancho,” the wandering schoolyard brawler who’s huge, with wrapped ribs, and a piece of tall grass in his mouth. Rikishi’s appearance later in the manga is foreshadowed in the color section at the front of this book, and he fits the stereotype almost to a tee. There’s actually great gags about bancho in both Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga (which we read a while back) and in Usamaru Furuya’s Short Cuts, which, spoiler, we will read later this season.

P.S. Rikiishi are also what sumo wrestlers are called in Japan, with a direct translation being “powerful warrior.” So, uh, a little extra nudge for the Japanese readers there, that this dude will be powerful and important.

20:15 Former Marvel comics editor in chief Jim Shooter coined the phrase “Every comic is someone’s first.” This is both technically true and responsible for the Marvel comics style in the 1980s that saw characters needing to be introduced by name the first time they showed up in an issue, the necessity of one-issue stories (or two if you got really lucky). This credo sort of defined Western comics storytelling for a few decades.

Long serialized manga like Ashita no Joe featured a similar situation, with main characters either needing that same periodic reintroduction by name, or needing to be generic enough that your average reader could figure out what their deal was pretty quick without it. Deb’s anecdote about Korean webtoons is also pretty interesting too. Looks like that editorial advice is truly international.

22:18 I’m old and I’ve been on the internet a long time, so you’ll need to trust me when I tell you that John Byrne hated Ultimate Spider-Man because of the decompressed storytelling, because I looked and I can’t find a link to his complaints at the time.

22:47 We really liked the fact that, despite splitting Joe and his coach apart with the prison (“juvenile hall”) sentence, Danpei is still coaching him, sending him postcards explaining boxing!

Rikishi’s a dick.

23:00 Deb references All-Rounder Meguru, another Kodansha title that takes a more academic, explainer-vibe to fight manga. We read that one too and had some pretty different takes on it. You can check out our episode on it here:

23:31 The overall storytelling of this book is very different than most titles we’ve read, though obviously its got something in common with other classic titles like those of Mitsuru Adachi, Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori that we’ve enjoyed. But yeah, LOTS of very dense pages, like this 8-panel layout on page 239:

I’m actually kind of shocked that it doesn’t seem more crowded than it is.

24:14 So who influences who?

Like this is maybe outside the scope of these show notes, but at least in comics I’ve noticed that there’s the people who make the big splash, the people that can’t help but be influenced by them (or are ordered by their editors to make their work look like the big-splash for commercial reasons).

Then after a while, there’s the people who are consciously trying to subvert that art (but reaction is still influence). Eventually, you get artists coming in for whom the big-splash is just one of dozens of artistic influences on them from across their instruction. So you have someone like Chiba who is a direct descendent of the work of Osamu Tezuka (debuted in 1947). When Chiba debuts in 1958, and while he’s pulling in other influences, the similarities are undeniable. No shame no shade.

Actually, here’s another cover from Weekly Shonen Magazine, courtesy of Deb.

This magazine features many of the creators working in and serialized in the magazine at the time, including Tetsuya Chiba… and Osamu Tezuka! You get a sense of who knew who, who was hanging out with whom, etc., and it’s a hell of a photo.

Deb helpfully created a massive twitter thread that identifies all of the people on this cover and their work, and you can check it out here: https://x.com/debaoki/status/1490709993267478528

So that covers some of the “bullpen” type influence. For our superhero fans, it’s a bit like how John Buscema literally drew “How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way” and so every young artist who came after him at Marvel (and a few before) have Buscema in their artistic DNA.

Meanwhile, with characters like Pinoko (from Black Jack by Tezuka), and the little girl in the gang of street youth here, they both come from a baby-girl trope that was prevalent in shonen manga (sort of a caricature of a girl for boy readers), although Pinoko became weirdly popular for some reason I cannot fathom. There’s like Pinoko merch, it’s utterly bizarre. Anyway, you can check out Black Jack in digital editions (volumes 1-3 are still in print) from Kodansha, I think Pinoko debuts in volume 3.

https://kodansha.us/series/black-jack/

26:37 Meanwhile, Cross Game author Mitsuru Adachi was BORN in 1951, and wouldn’t make his debut until 1970. He’s clearly working in the world and the rules established by Tezuka and his contemporaries, but there’s definitely different qualities to his work, with softer and slightly more sophisticated character designs, more filmic (rather than animated) storytelling, and slightly subtler stories. But you can still see the bones, for sure. Go listen to our episode on Cross Game and then buy whatever you can find, it’s such a good series.

For the close readers of the show notes though, I’d love to hear about manga artists who you think bucked the trend of the visual and storytelling style that Tezuka established, post-war. Is it just the Gekiga artists? Would love to read your thoughts.

27:49 We wrote all about the famous manga creator rooming-house Tokiwa-so, as its been recreated as a museum! Read about it here:

31:30

“If you’re on Team ACAB, this is the book for you.”
- Chip Zdarsky, Mangasplaining

34:40 Rikishi, the “powerful warrior” is massive, a teenager, and larger and stronger than any adult in the story… so far. Especially the roly-poly keystone cops portrayed in the same chapters.

35:11 I was laughing out loud on an airplane, reading this scene. Rikishi punching bulls to knock them unconscious, after having them angered and sent directly towards him. Like, talk about shonen power inflation! First pigs…

…and then bulls!

35:45 In case we don’t get to it elsewhere in the episode or in the show-notes, Ashita no Joe actually IS a funny manga too, alongside all of the melodrama. Here’s Joe riding a pig for example, which should be your new phone lock-screen.

36:25 This series is very much a fantasy of what it’s like to be a street tough, out on your own, using your fists to survive. While I have literally no doubt that writer Takamori experienced first-hand much of what’s depicted happening to Joe, the series does get farther and farther from objective reality as it goes on. I mean this shot of the “Special Reformatory” for teenaged boys is straight outta Looney Tunes, you know? But wow, as a kid reading this in Weekly Shonen, it probably would’ve been TERRIFYING.

…and then they whip a guy until he bleeds at the direction of the only female character to show how cruel she is!

I think Chip’s reading is… interesting, but… I ultimately disagree.

40:00 That said, Chip’s favourite two quotes of the book are both top notch:

“Let’s see what your balls are made of!”

“I’m head over heels for those two arms of yours!”

41:15 All the shojo boys’ boarding school manga from the 70s REALLY set the record ‘straight’ on what’s going on in those reformatories, in addition to the, you know, physical violence. You should check out Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas for more on that. Maybe one day Keiko Takemiya’s Song of Wind and Trees will also be publishing in English.

[DEB: Song of the Wind and Trees is, however, available in Italian. If you’re dying to read this one, that might be your next best bet.]

That said, there are certain sequences in the book that can be, ah, read into as one likes.

And the lusting by certain members of the reform school prisoners over Yoko are… prurient?

42:00 And now it’s time for Little Brothers, a.k.a. Sweat the Small Stuff, where David points out the little details in the book that he loved. First up, David mentions this really excellent bit of comics, where the light goes out and we just get the lightbulb’s silhouette. It’s really striking, as is this entire sequence when the light comes back on. Putting that beat-down in the dark makes it seem much more violent than the other fights in the book, even with though the speech balloons soften it considerably, and is probably closer to what things were like in actual juvenile hall.

Chilling stuff.

His second favourite bit is another great gag, when the boxing match is about to break out and a kid dressed as a referee stands up and asks if HE can be the referee.

42:50 Chip’s very-own “Little Brothers” moment is on page 448… the tension of the preceding scene and the almost-fight and calling out Yoko and all of it is broken by one of the cops needing to take a leak in the bottom-right corner of the page.

Probably where the original chapter ended, on a gag. Then on page 449, which feels like it was inserted to smooth the continuity out a little bit, we get the panel at the top, linking the continuity between the two and adding a little puddle.

43:50 And then, as promised, there’s the whole fart breakdown.

I think we covered this, but I do think since I’m doing show notes anyway that it’s important to note that comics like this, ostensibly more than a little too mature for their age-range along certain vectors, would frequently include gags and jokes and toilet humor (often literally this volume, with the farting kids and the peeing cop) to keep the mood light and keep younger readers entertained. They might not get the full weight of Joe accusing Yoko of her deadly snobbery, but a guy who can’t control his bladder like a puppy is something that all ages understand.

This is one of the things, incidentally, that turned Chip off when reading through Tezuka’s Phoenix, the whiplash cartooniness of the moods from serious to silly. It’s just part of the storytelling during this time period, and while traces of this persist, toilet humor tends to be a lot rarer in shonen magazines these days.

44:30 And yeah, this story has almost certainly been re-edited from how it was originally serialized, with only a few hints to the book’s weekly chapter breaks and edited-for-the-trade pages still remaining. For example, you can see the slight differences in the peeing panels above, the ropes on top of the truck cab and the shading are completely different. And then earlier in the books, you can see pages 213 and page 214 repeating those two panels with significant differences as they likely closed the story one week, begun it again the next.

When it comes to breaks between volumes of the book, pages 224 to 225 also pretty clearly show the end of volume 1 of the manga, and the beginning of volume 2.

This is a bit like when we were reading the early volumes of AKIRA, and discovering just how much had been changed between the original printing and the version we got in North America. Where the chapter breaks went, what was changed, added, edited, removed. When looking at a classic manga, it’s really interesting to see how the version we hold in our hands came to be.

Of course, given the popularity of this series, a lot of this “sleuthing” has already been done by fans in Japan. I came across this fan-site of Ashita no Joe while working on the show notes here, and its really interesting. Highly recommend you check it out if this kind of thing is your bag, particularly this chapter-by-chapter breakdown page.

Incidentally, AKIRA fans in Japan are getting to discover the behind-the-scenes of that series now, as the recently-released OTOMO THE COMPLETE WORKS 12: AKIRA 1 strips out almost all of the corrections, additions, and polish that was added to the AKIRA collected edition, and even restores chapter pages and more. Read all about it at CHRONOTOMO.

I ALMOST bought this in Japan and I’m starting to regret not having done so.

45:23 The Japanese sound effects kick-ass, and I think letterer Evan Hayden did a good job here too. While we’ve shown you a LOT of great examples here, rest assured that there are way more in the book too. But let’s give you one more, this being the sound effects of police sirens wafting in on the wind.

47:30

“For sixty bucks you can’t go wrong!”

- Chip Zdarsky, Mangasplaining

49:30 How would you feel reading this in the time it was released, for the first time? We’ll never know, but thinking about the book in this way will help you maybe help you realize just how important this work is.

51:44

“Once a boxer’s in the ring, he’s alone as a man can be.
Let the screaming of your flesh and bone guide you, Joe.
Keep fighting til you’re spitting blood and can’t take another step.
Because the outcome of this first fight will determine your destiny.
It’s a fork in the road to tomorrow.”

• Danpei Tange, Ashita no Joe

52:35 - THE BREAK

Shout-outs!

Chip Shouts-Out David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One Artist Edition, a counterpart to Chip & David’s much beloved Daredevil: Born Again Artist Edition. It’s incredibly beautiful, designed by Chip Kidd, and has a great foreword too.

Deb shouts-out a bar, “Bar Lonely” in Shinjuku, Golden Gai. Deb did actually take me there, but unfortunately when we went it was packed to the gills and we couldn’t get in. Tourists in Golden Gai, what are you gonna do except discover other, more secret drinking alleys? Still, this seems like a fun bar.

At this point we get into a fun round about where we talk about what kind of bar we’d open, in the spirit of a Ashita no Joe bar.

Christopher shouts-out Maurice Vellekoop’s graphic novel I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together, which just won the Toronto Book Award, the first graphic novel to do so. Go get it!

David shouts-out the television series THE OLD MAN, season 2 grabbed his attention and didn’t let go.

Finally, after this podcast was completed, we couldn’t stop learning about Ashita no Joe, and Youtube is a TREASURE TROVE of videos of people professing their love for the series and what it all means. Deb particularly enjoyed this video essay and wanted to share it with all of you.

—

And that’s an episode of Mangasplaining! This episode is also available wherever you get your podcasts, so please subscribe and leave a review, so others can discover our show.

Thanks so much for listening! Please support your local comic and manga specialty shop when purchasing these books, and you can find one near you at comicshoplocator.com. You can also check your local library for print and digital lending options, they have TONS of manga! Finally, thanks to D.A.D.S. for their musical accompaniment for this episode.

Nobody’s promised tomorrow…

Listen and Subscribe to the Podcast:
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Also check out our digital manga publishing endeavors and newsletter at MangasplainingExtra.com.

Daredevil: Born Again
Written by Frank Miller
Art by David Mazzucchelli (with Dennis Janke)
Colored by Christie Scheele and Richmond Lewis
Lettered by Joe Rosen
Edited by Ralph Macchio

Published by Marvel Comics (Print/Digital)

Audio editing by David Brothers. Show notes by Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and Deb Aoki

ABOUT DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN

Marvel Comics describes Daredevil: Born Again thusly:

Visionary geniuses Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City) and David Mazzucchelli (Batman: Year One) bring you this classic Daredevil story that redefined the character and created a new benchmark in graphic storytelling.

The book that inspired Daredevil’s portrayal in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Daredevil: Born Again premieres March 2025 on Disney+.

From the powerhouse pairing of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli comes the definitive Daredevil tale. Karen Page, Matt Murdock’s former lover, sets into motion a Machiavellian chain of events by trading away his secret identity for a drug fix. Now, Daredevil must find all the strength he can muster as Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime, wastes no time taking him down as low as a human can get. As he’s nursed back to health by a nun named Sister Maggie, Matt discovers a shocking secret that will change their relationship forever — but can he piece his life back together and survive a battle against the brutal super-soldier named Nuke?

Collects Daredevil #226-233

Before We Get Started

Hi all, Christopher here again. What a year it’s been! This episode was recorded back in February, and we just squeaked it out in October, 2024. Show notes coming your way in December, I’m playing Christmas music in the background. Did you know that there’s a Lo-fi Christmas station on Youtube Music? Anyway. It’s been a pretty challenging year for me personally, honestly, with the unfortunate loss of a number of people very close to me. It threw things into disarray, especially trying to juggle all of my work responsibilities alongside of this incredible project, Mangasplaining. I know everyone else on the team has had their challenges too, and you know, we’re human and life is life. I don’t really talk about it a lot online but, hug your loved ones and let them know you love them. But hopefully, HOPEFULLY, this is back to normal.

That out of the way, this episode actually came about from a conversation some time last season, where Deb was talking about her unfamiliarity with American superhero comics. She said that she read a few back in the day but fell out of love with them as her love for manga grew. Then Chip picked this one for her to read as a fun inversion of the Mangasplaining format! Then we found out that Deb had already read it, but it was too late, the die was cast, and here we are. Still, this turned out to be a VERY fun episode, we hope you enjoy it.

3:56 SPOILERS! SO MANY SPOILERS! Normally I wouldn’t like, mind spoiling a forty year old comic book, but with the book getting a television adaptation next year it’s probably worth letting people know. Also, fun-fact, I couldn’t get the Daredevil: Born Again trade to show up when I searched Marvel’s website, but it did have all of the TV show announcements!

So yes, absolutely, this sequence inside the jail cell is really incredible, with the absolute journalist’s focus on getting the necessary shots, and it is a huge spoiler:

That’s the entire four-page sequence, complete with mid-page scene change. They’re breaking ALL the rules of superhero comcis with this one!

5:30: Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada Daredevil for Marvel Knights really did “save” the company by reinventing Marvel’s street-level characters back in the 2000s. Daredevil in particular had somewhat… floundered… for several years, before Smith and Quesada’s back-to-basics approach with the character that was heavily, heavily drenched in nostalgia for this specific story and era of Miller & Mazz DD work. In fact, it went so well it got Quesada the EIC spot at Marvel.

There’s probably a MUCH bigger essay to be written here, but almost everything that Quesada did during his tenure as EIC of Marvel, the back-to-basics-but-bigger approach that brought us The Ultimates and then the Avengers movies and MCU that followed really sprung from the Smith/Quesada Daredevil, and that sprung from… well, this. So when we talk about this being an influential story, it really, really is.

Worth noting that Quesada left Marvel and is now firmly doing his own thing. Read all about it on his Substack.

6:20: It’s funny because Deb hadn’t read a lot of superhero stuff, and so Chip picked this as Deb’s “comic book.” Turns out she read it, and that she also really liked this same duo’s Batman: Year One.

7:20: This is a chatty, chatty comic. Here’s an average page with all of the word balloons.

8:21 Betsy. Short for Elizabeth. Ben Urich’s wife and Nuke’s gun have the same name. I think we can just chalk this up to Frank Miller’s penchant for ‘classic’ sounding lady names, like you might find in a 50s pulp novel. That said, someone shoulda caught that in editorial, lol.

13:29 “He wears the flag.” “I hadn’t noticed.” Good comics, right there.

16:00 Keeping in the spirit of “ComicSplaining” this episode, which is to say things that manga fans might not know about: We should mention briefly that there are two different black-and-white editions of this trade paperback, that strip out all of the color and offer a look at the raw artwork. Unlike the Marvel edition that’s the product of several generations of degradation due to reproduction with color, for these B&W editions they went back to the original art (apparently artist David Mazzucchelli still had all of the pages!) and scanned them as “perfect” reproductions.

The Artisan Edition is a hardcover at roughly 11” x 17”, with the artwork printed at its original size. That 200+ page book will run you about US$150 (new printing coming in May) before any kind of discounts. The smaller Artist’s Edition is a hardcover that’s slightly bigger than the standard edition at roughly 8” x 12”, and has the same great art shrunk down for about US$50 before discounts.

And here’s a look at some of those gorgeous B&W pages. Honestly, stunning.

Honestly, the work is just SO MUCH NICER scanned from the originals than it is in the standard paperback. I kind of can’t believe they haven’t used these scans to go back and recolor/re-do the entire book in “hi-res”, because over time, woof, some of these panels have REALLY degraded. Maybe they haven’t because it would be expensive? Or maybe it’s because the artist/artisan editions were produced entirely by IDW Publishing, under the direction of Scott Dunbier (who left that company and has formed his own, ACT 4). I dunno! Strange times we’re living in.

17:24 So the nicest thing about the Artisan Edition existing is that it makes it much easier to actually talk about the art. The artist started using all kinds of traditional design techniques that weren’t largely a part of mainstream comics’ repertoire at the time, including markers, ziptone, and maybe even like washes and charcoal? It changed the whole look of the book, in a way that not even the muddy printing and bright colors could obscure. Take a look at this photo of the artist edition from AE Index’s review, to see just how unique these pages look:

18:47 Speaking of color, we were impressed with the use of pin & red for the scene where J. Jonah Jameson calls Ben Urich a coward.

We also talked a lot about different visual effects that Mazzucchelli instructs the colorists to use, like color-holds to make the snow on the telephone wires stand our, or the ziptone on the crashed underwater taxi, or even when Foggy and Ben meet they do a full on black and white panel. It’s not even the first black and white sequence, with several sections of “flashbacks” told in black and white with tone. Here’s a gallery:

24:40 The Karen in Mexico sequences that start off the book are particularly visually unique.

25:00 Talking about top-notch re-colouring, I think my friend Jose’s Villarrubia’s reworking of the colors on Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing, or even his complete reconstructions of pages by Richard Corben in the complete Corben from Dark Horse, are probably the best in the biz right now. Quoting Jose:

Back on June 11, I posted a teaser image of the new restoration that I was doing of Absolute Swamp Thing. Since it had not been released, I could not post preview images. Well, now it's for sale everywhere so here it is!

The two images on top are the recoloring that are featured in all the collections until now. On the bottom left is the original series colors and the last one is my recreation.

It is amazing the subtle effects that colorists (in this case probably Wrightson himself) could get out of the old technique on newsprint!

• Jose Villarrubia

So yeah, when we talk about the recoloring that needs to be done to make this project look and feel like it must have when those issues were first released, I think this is what I’m getting at. I know it’s possible, but does Marvel want to actually spend the money to do it right? Because right now it feels more like the ones at the top, in my opinion.

26:38 Ben Urich, page 139, eyes are spirals. Nice touch!

27:58 When he’s on the phone in the newsroom, interesting use of wide panels.

29:55 The book starts out with an omniscient narrator at the beginning (those yellow caption boxes up top), and switches narration styles and types frequently. Deb found it confusing, but Chip feels like Miller was just trying stuff out. You can see the narration changing repeatedly through the images we’ve already shown. It’s sometimes clear who is speaking, but unless you’re really “in” the story, sometimes it very much is not.

35:31 Yeah, if you’re reading this an issue at a time on the Marvel app, after this storyline we get two “fill-in” issues featuring story and art by Steve Ditko, and then Barry Windsor Smith! It’s kind of a wild situation reading this book an issue at a time, with so many huge swings in style and tone, particularly after a genre-defining and character-defining run like this. It’s one of the reasons manga fans prefer manga, one* creator’s hand directing the story from start to finish. We’ve already used so many images this episode, you’ll just need to trust us here.

39:00: Chip wisely points out that the book was [likely] running late due to the amount of work Mazzucchelli was putting into the artwork,, and so the opening pages of the chapter “Parriah” or mostly one illustration, reproduced, with large pieces of text. It’s a striking moment in the book and doesn’t read like a fill-in at all, but it is pretty great.

41:25: The single page with the appearance of the avengers is so completely different to how the characters were previously portrayed. Really interesting, and I don’t think it was really picked up on again (to my knowledge) until Kurt Busiek’s MARVELS, seeing these characters as larger-than-life Gods. Chip gets into the idea that comics changed drastically after these books came out… It’s hard to deny.

Since we have it from Amazon, here’s the rescanned version of this page from the original art. It’s pretty clearly much crisper, even being viewed as a compressed JPG on a small screen.

44:50 We all heard that, David.

46:00 I think what Chip is saying here is honestly true, that if you’re going to keep working on these characters with 70 years of history, you need to pick and choose and try to do new work. But Deb’s criticism that it’s inconsistent and unenjoyable to her is also valid. As we’ve discussed on the podcast I’ve run into my own problems because of the compromises that need to be made to work on these kinds of books too, so I get where they’re both coming from.

55:30: IT’S TRICKY

Now you know what goes through my head anytime anyone says IT’S TRICKY in any context.

1:09:20 I love when Chip is at his chippiest, because this story is killer. “FAPP FAPP FAPP” is the perfect sound effect, as evidenced by Matt Murdock and the punching bag:

It’s a shame we’ll never, ever get that again due to “evolving language usage.” Hahaha

1:10:00 Deb just checked right out when she first opened up the book. The whole sequence with Karen in Mexico is meant to be sweaty and ugly and bleak and offputting, and I guess it worked!

1:10:47 “Almost like a different language…?” It’s really interesting and that’s what, at least for the first few seasons, that’s entirely what this Podcast was about; Chip coming from American comics and seeing this totally different storytelling language, or maybe dialect, and finding out how it works and adjusting. Chip talks about it really well here.

Deb brings up an interesting and then-recent tweet from our pal Jim Zub about the necessities of modern single-issue comic book writing, where you have to grab readers early, have a fight scene, have an important moment, all for the adrenalin hit and making sure readers feel like they got their money’s worth.

If you want to see the tweet it’s here: https://x.com/JimZub/status/1752673665471168640

But it looks like Jim wrote the whole thing up into a “Comics School” post on his patreon, you can check that out here: https://www.jimzub.com/dont-fight-the-format/

1:13:00 We only cut out 4 minutes! Probably blank spaces. You’re getting a LOT of unfettered us, on this podcast.

1:14:00 Too many words, says Deb.

1:14:10 Kingpin won’t shut up! Rich people, amirite?

1:15:30 Deb just called Chip a Disney Adult, and damn that’s perfect. Marvel fans are now officially Disney Adults. You heard it here on the MANGASPLAINING PODCAST.

1:18:10 David Mazzucchelli, yeah I didn’t actually read EVERYTHING apparently, I actually just meant City of Glass and his work on Rubber Blanket, lol. Thanks to my buddy Gary for pointing out that he did some Indiana Jones, and apparently he inked Michael Golden on issue #31 of G.I.Joe? That’s… bonkers. Haha, I’d love to see that. I wonder if it’s online somewhere legally.

Also wanted to include that the story Daredevil: Year One expands on the scene where Matt got his powers in this volume, and that scene is tied to the origins of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the original cannon, with the same cannister that hit Matt breaking and coating the turtles and Splinter. So, now you know!

And that’s this episode!

1:20:52: THE BREAK

It’s time for PICKING BOOKS! It’s a tricky one, this week.

We start off with David tricking Chip into picking a heavily out of print, no-digital book, Short Cuts Volume 1 by Usamaru Furuya. Uh, I have no idea how any of you will find and read this legally, my apologies. It was published by a version of VIZ Media that no longer exists.

Deb tricks Chip into picking The Fable, volumes 1 AND 8, by Katsuhisa Minami and published by Kodansha.

Christopher picks Taiyo Matsumoto’s newest comic, Tokyo These Days 1, published by VIZ, which is the most obvious possible pick for Christopher to make.

That means upcoming comics list looks like:

• [Special Episode TBA coming very soon]

• Guardians of the Louvre, by Jiro Taniguchi

• Kaiju no. 8 vol. 1 by Naoya Matsumoto

• Dogs Red, by Satoru Noda

• The Fable vol. 1 & vol. 8 by Katsuhisa Minami

• Tokyo These Days vol 1 by Taiyo Matsumoto

• Short Cuts vol. 1 by Usamaru Furuya

SHOUT OUTS!

David shouts out a specific page from a book I don’t own so I can’t do much about that? But Matt and Karen hugging from Born Again is nice, even with their almost sketched in backgrounds.

Deb shouts out Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor, published Fantagraphics. As a reminder this episode was recorded back in February, 2024 before everything went down.

Chip picks Daredevil: Born Again Artist Edition/Artisan Edition, whichever you’ve got the budget for. Which we’ve referenced a bunch.

Christopher recommends Ryan North’s run on Fantastic Four. And yeah, I gave the germ of the idea of what Ryan did with Franklin Richards but took it in an entirely different direction. Also, it has Dinosaur Doctor Doom in it, which is pretty great.

And that’s an episode of Mangasplaining! This episode is also available wherever you get your podcasts, so please subscribe and leave a review, so others can discover our show.

Thanks so much for listening! Please support your local comic and manga specialty shop when purchasing these books, and you can find one near you at comicshoplocator.com. You can also check your local library for print and digital lending options, they have TONS of manga! Finally, thanks to D.A.D.S. for their musical accompaniment for this episode.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the first chapter of Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy Volume 3, based on the manga Dororo by Osamu Tezuka. As a reminder, we’re making the first chapter of a new volume free to read for all subscribers, but future chapters from this volume will be locked and only available for paid subscribers. Also, paid subscribers get access to CBZ and PDFs of each chapter, that they can keep. Those are all that’s after the paywall in this post.

This is another big chapter of Search and Destroy, and frankly all of the chapters in volume 3 are longer than usual, making volume 3 a whopper. It really feels like Kaneko-sensei was trying to cram in a ton of extra ideas before the series came to an end with volume 3, and it makes each of these chapters absolutely thrilling! It’s also been a ton of additional work for our creative team of translator Ben Applegate and letterer Phil Christie, and I thank them for their hard work here! Otsukaresamadesu.

Since we finished up serializing Volume 2, Fantagraphics actually released Volume 1 in print! You can buy it now at: Fantagraphics | Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Indigo | WHSmith | Books-A-Million and really good local comic book shops, too! Please do, so Fanta will wanna keep making more weird/fun manga with us.

We’re so completely thrilled with how the print edition of volume 1 came out, and the reviews have been phenomenal too. We also commissioned an original introduction for volume 1, written by Frederico Anzalone, and we’ve shared it here on Substack. It adds some great content to Kaneko-sensei’s oeuvre and the creation of this series in particular. Please check it out:

On a personal note (it’s Christopher btw), I did want to say that the feeling I get every week when putting together these chapters for Substack is… thrilling. Even having read the series already, seeing it a chapter at a time, the action, the horror, the huge revelations and the quiet moments, they hit again like the first time. Ben Applegate was saying something similar as we were going through some of the upcoming chapters with the revelations giving him chills. This is a great, great manga, and I remain incredibly proud of it grateful that I get to be on the team bringing it to you.

So that said, we’ll link all of the previous chapters below, make sure you’re caught up, and then jump into chapter 13 below.

Previous Chapters:
Volume One: Introduction (Free) | 00-01 (Free) | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 |
Volume Two: 07 (Free) | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12

Search and Destroy - Chapter 13

By Atsushi Kaneko, based on the story Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
Translated by Ben Applegate, Lettered by Phil Christie.
Reads right-to-left. Looks better on the Substack app or website.

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