However, there are still plenty of legendary mangaka who have yet to see ANY English release, even after nearly 40 years of officially licensed manga in English. Therefore let's go over twelve that, in my opinion, should be given that chance one day, and I'll bring up some titles from each mangaka that would make the most sense to bring over in English.
We'll start off with a creator whose most iconic work has recently gotten its first official English release, in this case via its anime adaptation being streamed; however, that's anime so it doesn't count for this list. Born on December 11, 1952, Osamu Akimoto actually first got his start in the anime industry, despite his dream being to make manga after his mother gifted him Shotaro Ishinomori's Guide to Becoming a Mangaka in the mid-60s. However, after graduating high school he instead went into animation, first failing Muchi Pro's entrance exam before finding a job at Tatsunoko, where he worked for two years as an animator (most notably on Gatchaman) before quitting due to him needing to care for his ill mother. In 1976 he submitted a comedic one-shot manga about officers who work at a police box in his hometown of Kameari, Katsushika titled Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Kouen Mae Hashutsujo/This is the Police Box in Front of Kameari Park in Katsushika Ward... and the rest is history. The one-shot would become a finalist for the Young Jump Award in 1976, before getting serialized in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump later that same year, where it would run for 40 years across 1,955 chapters (with Akimoto legendarily never missing a single deadline) & total 200 volumes before ending in 2016; it has received various one-shots since then, with a 201st volume coming out in 2021. Shortened to simply Kochikame, the series one of the most iconic manga in all of Japan, and from 1996 to 2004 a TV anime adaptation by Studio Pierrot ran in on TV for 344 episodes, as well as 27 TV specials (the last of which was in 2016, to celebrate the end of the manga's serialization), and recently Remow has started offering the Kochikame anime via its YouTube channel with English subs (US & Canada only), one "new" episode per week.
Of course, with Kochikame being such an absurdly long manga, so much so that one of its various "Best of" releases is itself 40 volumes long (one for each year), it's always seemed like an impossibility for it to ever see official English release. However, that's not to say that Osamu Akimoto has no other manga in his catalog to consider, especially in the near-decade since Kochikame's serialization came to an end. Let's start with one that actually started during Kochikame's decades-long run, Mr. Clice. Debuting back in 1985 in the pages of Monthly Shonen Jump, Mr. Clice is a comedic espionage manga about Jin Clice, a James Bond-esque secret agent who, after an accident that would have killed him, finds himself in the body of a 20-year old tennis player who died the same day, and now he continues doing his work as a female agent, despite still having his male mind fully intact. Mr. Clice would run on & off until Monthly Jump itself ended in 2007, but in 2017 Akimoto revived the manga, first in Jump Square & now in Jump SQ. Rise, where it now runs quarterly; Volume 14 is currently scheduled for release in Japan in July 2025. Then there's Black Tiger, a post-Civil War Wild West manga that ran in Grand Jump from 2016 to 2023 for 11 volumes about the titular female gunslinger who hunts down various bounties, both for personal gain & sometimes under government order; Akimoto stated that this manga was his homage to gekiga, like Wild 7. For something shorter there's Ii Yu da ne!!/What a Nice Hot Bath!!, a two-volume manga from 2017 to 2019 that takes place in the world of Kochikame & stars Maria, a Brazilian woman who moves to Tokyo to help her Japanese husband's father run the local public bathhouse. Finally, there's Akimoto's other current serialization, Time Tuber Yukari, which is about a high school girl who becomes a YouTuber that records her escapades in the past using a time travel device she found; only one collected volume is out, so far.
Yes, none of those are anywhere near as iconic as Kochikame (though Mr. Clice at least has its own notable length of serialization, by this point, even if it was mostly irregular for the longest time), but I do feel that Osamu Akimoto not having at least one of his manga be given an official English release is sad to see, especially since now there are more options than ever to choose from. Personally, I'd love to see Mr. Clice & Black Tiger the most, but I'd really be happy with any of them.
Up next is a mangaka who's notable for having very few overall manga, especially serializations, in his catalog despite having been in the business for about as long as English-translated manga has been a thing. Born on December 22, 1966, Masanori Morita had his first published manga while still in high school, as his one-shot It's Late won an Honorable Mention at the Tezuka Awards in 1984 & got published in an issue of Fresh Jump. After graduating he moved to Tokyo & soon found himself as an assistant to the legendary Tetsuo Hara during the later days of Fist of the North Star's serialization. Morita would then make his proper debut as a mangaka in mid-1988 with Rokudenashi Blues, which would become an iconic yankii manga for Shonen Jump & run all the way until early 1997 for 421 chapters across 42 volumes, his longest work to date by a large margin; it's also the longest Jump manga to have never received a TV anime adaptation. Morita would then follow that up in early 1998 with Rookies, a baseball manga about a high school team made up of delinquents (& the new teacher who becomes their coach), which would run until mid-2003 for 233 chapters across 24 volumes; Rookies would also get an iconic J-Drama adaptation in 2008 that recently got added to Netflix with English subs. Then, after a two-year hiatus, Morita returned in 2005 with Beshari-Gurashi/A Stepped On Way of Living, which focused on two friends who want to become a successful comedy duo, a manga that initially got its start in Shonen Jump before getting moved to Weekly Young Jump in 2007, where it ran on & off until 2015 (plus a short revival in 2019) & totaled 20 volumes.
For the longest time, outside of a variety of one-shots, those were the literal only manga Masanori Morita has ever made, and in fact after Beshari-Gurashi's revival in 2019 finished up he went on yet another hiatus from making manga. Therefore, it's easy to see why absolutely nothing from Morita has ever been licensed for English release, because all three of his works are rather... "unorthodox" for most English publishers, not to mention lengthy. Rokudenashi Blues is very much a straight-up delinquent story, something that only recently has started to find something of a fanbase in English via titles like Wind Breaker & Tokyo Revengers, but it's age & sheer length will continue to make it nigh-impossible to work over here. Likewise, Rookies is a baseball manga at its core, another type of story that only recently has started to find more of a fanbase, but while it's awesome that Netflix is streaming the beloved live-action adaptation I highly doubt that'll make it any more likely for the manga to be given an English release. Finally, Beshari-Gurashi's focus on comedy would definitely make it the toughest thing to bring over, due to the difficulties there'd likely be in localizing the humor for an English speaking audience. However, there was the more recent Show-ha Shoten! by Akinari Asakusa & Takeshi Obata that Viz has been releasing in English, which is a similar comedy duo story to Beshari-Gurashi. But there is one last Masanori Morita manga to consider, and it's coincidentally his most recent. Running in Grand Jump from 2022 to 2024 for only three volumes, Zashisu is a murder mystery about a struggling junior high teacher discovering that his old junior high friends are getting killed one by one, and how everything is seemingly playing out like the plot of an unpublished novel titled "Zashisu" that was written by an old classmate that they used to bully... but said classmate had died before the novel could get published.
Truly, if there's any chance for Masanori Morita to ever get published in English, it'd be with Zashisu, as it's both recent, unique, & short... but who knows if any English manga publisher would even care to give it a go.
I'll fully admit that there's a distinct lack of attention given to female-oriented anime & manga (i.e. shojo, josei, etc.) on the blog, and that's 100% all on me; it's not like I'm against that stuff in any way, but it's simply not my forte. Still, I absolutely have to include some iconic female mangaka in this list, and what better place to start than with a member of the legendary Year 24 Group? Only a handful of that group has actually seen official English releases of at least one of their works, namely Yasuko Aoike (From Eroica with Love), Moto Hagio (They Were 11!, The Poe Clan, The Heart of Thomas), Riyoko Ikeda (The Rose of Versailles, Claudine), & Keiko Takemiya (Toward the Terra, Andromeda Stories), but one person who helped inspire many of them was Hideko Mizuno. Born on October 29, 1939, Mizuno was inspired to become a mangaka by the early works of Osamu Tezuka, and after getting to meet the man himself in 1955 was eventually invited to board with him in the legendary Tokiwa-so apartment building as one of his assistants, which she did for a year & befriending fellow residents Shotaro Ishinomori & Fujio Akatsuka. After that stint Mizuno would help redefine shojo manga, transitioning it from focusing mostly on mother-daughter stories to more dramatic & personal stories, as well as putting a stronger emphasis on proper romance. In fact, Mizuno has apparently sometimes been nicknamed "The Female Tezuka" for how much impact she has had on shojo manga storytelling.
With that kind of pedigree, one might wonder what title could even be considered a good choice for releasing in English when it comes to Hideko Mizuno. For example, Mizuno created the manga Honey Honey no Suteki na Bouken/Honey Honey's Wonderful Adventure back in the 60s, a two-volume series about a young girl who winds up on an adventure after her cat swallows a ring that various people are on the hunt for, and in 1981 Movie International Co. (with help from Toei Animation) produced a 29-episode TV anime adaptation that saw TV distribution around the world, including the US & Canada with an English dub (though only a small portion of the dub ever saw home video release); I also wonder if Hirohiko Araki was making a Honey Honey reference with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Tn a sense that would make for a fitting first English release for Mizuno, but instead I'm going to go with what looks to be Mizuno's most iconic work from her catalog, 1969's Fire!. Despite being a manga about rock music, this has seemingly nothing to do with the iconic song "Fire" by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown from just one year prior to this manga's debut. Instead, this four-volume series from the pages of Seventeen (in this case the literal Japanese equivalent to the American teen magazine, making it a rare manga to actually be serialized in it) tells the story of Aaron Browning, who after a stint in juvie becomes inspired to use music to help encourage people to live free through his songs. Aside from being one of the earliest shojo manga to actually feature a male main character, Fire! is also known for being an early example of a shojo manga that dared to showcase sexually explicit acts, and it's not surprising that its America-set story was heavily influenced by things like the counterculture movement of the time, the growing antiwar sentiment against everything happening in Vietnam, the hippie subculture, & (naturally) the music of the era. Today Fire! is considered an iconic series that helped changed the way shojo manga was looked at by readers in Japan (both male & female), and most recently was re-released in 2023 across two books by Bungeishunju, which included old one-shots by Mizuno about Pink Floyd & Keith Jarrett.
It's entirely possible that Fire! might be a tricky title to license, especially if those one-shots were to be included, but if there's any manga that would seemingly make for a perfect first English release for Hideko Mizuno, it'd be this one.
Similar to Osamu Akimoto, this next mangaka also had a decades-long serialization to his name but also had a catalog of other, much shorter works that one could theoretically look to for a first-time English release. Born on April 27, 1943, Yuji "George" Akiyama was a mangaka known best for two things. First was the manga Haguregumo, which ran in Big Comic Original from 1973 to 2017 for 112 volumes & showed the life of Kumo, a vagrant during the Edo period who rarely worked & was a notorious womanizer, despite being married & having two kids; the manga ended roughly three years before Akiyama's passing on May 12, 2020 at the age of 77. The second, though, was Akiyama's variety of manga that dealt with various controversial & incendiary topics, possibly influenced by his own upbringing, as his father was Korean (this was during World War II, so Koreans in Japan weren't given great treatment), his family eventually went through harsh poverty when his father's artificial flower business went belly up, & instead of going to high school Akiyama moved to Tokyo & did anything he could to support his family. This included working at a rental manga distributor & helping animate the Fight!! Osper anime in the mid-60s, all while trying to get published as a mangaka. Akiyama would eventually find his break in 1967, with the rest being (as I've said before already) history.
Naturally, while Haguregumo is arguably Akiyama's most iconic work, it's length makes it way too unreasonable to bring over. Plus, much like Hideko Mizuno, his most well known work are all from the 60s & 70s, but at least four that I've come up with are all rather short. My top pick, personally, would easily be 1970s Asura, a two-volume series about a young boy who had lived like an animal after being abandoned by his mother as a baby, but now had to figure out how to live amongst his fellow humans. Asura found instant notoriety with its first chapter, which showed the mother commit literal cannibalism on dead bodies in order to survive a famine, as well as literally try to cook & eat her own child, the titular Asura himself. In 2012 Toei would produce a hybrid 2D/CG anime movie adaptation of Asura, which I found absolutely engrossing & I would love to be able to read the OG manga. My next pick would be Delorinman, which comes in two forms: The 1969-1970 Shonen Jump original & the 1975-1976 Shonen Magazine remake; neither form is longer than three volumes long. Both detail similar stories about a man named Sanshiro whose failed suicide attempt results in a disfigured face & a renewed sense of worth as he reimagines himself as a hero of justice named Delorinman, despite everyone in town thinking he's become mentally unstable, with the biggest difference between the two being their respective final arcs, which see Delorinman take on different villains. Then there's 1972's The Moon, most recently released in 2019 across three books, which sees nine kids being put in control of the titular giant robot built by a mad billionaire who feels that "God is dead" & that the world has become too corrupt & evil; definitely sounds like it might have influenced Mohiro Kitoh's Bokurano, in some small way. Finally, my last pick would be 1970's Zeni Geba/Money & Power, a two-volume tale about Futaro Gamagori, who after a life of poverty finds himself killing & manipulating others so as to keep himself on the rise (both financially & socially), eventually taking over a company that belonged to a family he ingratiated himself with & even entering politics... but, as they say, what goes around comes around. Similar to Asura's portrayal of cannibalism, Zeni Geba got itself in hot water at the time due to is very concept & the things Gamagori did to stay on top.
Without a doubt, George Akiyama's most iconic titles (outside of Haguregumo) tend to focus on the flaws of humanity itself, and despite their age may actually still ring true, in some form, to this very day. Therefore, it's a bit disappointing that nothing from Akiyama has ever received an official English release yet.
OK, this next mangaka is definitely more than a bit different from the prior ones, as while I'm sure a more than decent amount of English-speaking manga fans have at least heard of the previous four names at least once, the same can definitely not be said of this man. Born on December 7, 1940, Mitsuyoshi Sonoda made his debut back in 1958 during the rental manga boom under the pen name "Hidekazu Arikawa", before moving over to the world of serialized manga magazines in the 60s under his real name. From a "mainstream" perspective Sonoda's most iconic works would be 1970's Akaki-chi no Eleven, a soccer manga he made with the late Ikki Kajiwara & its anime adaptation that same year would be the first ever soccer anime, & 1968's Akatsuki Sentoutai, a World War II manga he made with the late Shunsuke Sagara that found itself in controversy when Shonen Sunday offered a bunch of WWII-era memorabilia as things that could be won from a reader quiz. This included an Imperial Japanese Naval Academy uniform, US military goods, a Nazi flag & Iron Cross... and a Soviet military pistol. From what I can tell these weren't replicas, but rather were all legitimate items, so the outcry this got was 100% understandable, while Shogakukan's response was simply "We won't publicly reveal who won what, and we'll include a note explaining the importance of each item for the respective winners". Mitsuyoshi Sonoda would pass away from illness on March 17, 1997 at the age of 56.
However, the manga I want to focus on is one that was seemingly popular at the time, before being forgotten for a while, but today is actually looked at as a true trailblazer that seemingly helped with the rise of gekiga throughout the 60s & 70s. First appearing in 1965, Iron Muscles (not to be confused with the Go Nagai manga of the same katakana from the early 80s) was a rental manga that told the story of Satoru, a young boy who wound up being the witness to a murder during a bank robbery, & how he would come under the protection of a mysterious hitman known only as "Iron Muscles" & his squad of allies. While the concept of gekiga had already started a few years prior via the short-lived group known as "Gekiga Koubo", & Sonoda himself (then still using his pen name) was actually invited to be a part of the "New Gekiga Koubo" that Takao Saito wanted to form but never came to be, Iron Muscles is now looked at as an early example of gekiga that helped push its influence on the manga industry at large. It debuted no more than a year after Shirato Sanpei's iconic Garo magazine had debuted in 1964 (alongside Legend of Kamui), and Iron Muscles himself looks to possibly be an influence on the creation of Golgo 13's iconic hitman sniper, Duke Togo; since Saito obviously knew & respected Sonoda's skills, it's entirely plausible. Today Iron Muscles is readily available for people to read in Japan, as the 2005 collected edition by Manga Shop later got a digital re-release by Beaglee in 2017, and while Sonoda & his work may not be quite as known internationally as the others I listed previously I imagine reading Iron Muscles today could very well feel like a Rosetta stone-esque "Aha!" experience, of sorts.
While I absolutely wouldn't expect any of the major English publishers to ever touch Iron Muscles, I could absolutely see a boutique publisher like D&Q or Bubbles give it a release, complete with a long-form essay going over its impact on manga written by someone like Ryan Holmberg, a la Red-Colored Elegy, Bat Kid, or Igaguri: Young Judo Master.
Since the first half of this... half was done in a "two men, one woman" order, let's repeat that again as we end the first half of this list with another female mangaka, though in this case said mangaka is known mainly for one (highly influential) series. Born on December 20, 1946, Chikako Urano made her debut during the rental manga boom, but didn't really make a name for herself until she switched over to serialized manga via Shueisha's shojo magazine Margaret, which is still around to this day, in the latter half of the 60s. Specifically, Urano would become an icon with the debut of Attack No. 1 in 1968, a shojo sports manga whose impact is arguably still felt to this very day. Inspired by the "Oriental Witches", the name given to the Japanese Women's National Volleyball team that eventually won the gold medal at the 1964 Summer Olympics, Attack No. 1 told the journey of Kozue Ayuhara as she joins the Fujimi Junior High volleyball team, before eventually becoming the captain after leading a group of delinquents to a victory over the well-to-do current team, with the manga showing Kozue's rise throughout middle school, high school, & even onto the world stage. Running until late 1970 for a total of 12 volumes, Attack No. 1 would become the first ever shojo manga to total more than 10 volumes, and a TV anime adaptation by TMS that ran for 104 episodes between 1969 & 1971 would only add to the title's legacy, especially after the anime would get aired in various other countries, most notably in European regions, where it'd be able to continue off of the popularity of the Attacker You! volleyball anime from the 80s that aired in those regions first.
Alongside fellow volleyball manga Sign wa V! (which Kodansha published), Attack No. 1 helped reignite the popularity of volleyball in Japan that the Oriental Witches' 1964 Olympic victory first started, and the success of the manga encouraged the idea that long-running shojo manga could be a regular thing. Margaret magazine itself would later see similar success with titles like Aim for the Ace!, The Window of Orpheus, Swan, Yukan Club, & Boys Over Flowers, among other titles, and Urano herself would even return to her biggest work with New Attack No. 1 in 1975, though it was short-lived & only lasted two volumes. Urano looks to have retired from manga after 1978's Maddie no Bouken, though she's still alive to this day & has even survived her husband Yuu Nagurumi (a fellow mangaka who passed away in 2009), but Attack No. 1 has actually continued to live on with the occasional revival, all within the pages of Margaret. In 2004 a new New Attack No. 1 manga debuted that looks to be a full-on remake of the sequel drawn by Kanon Ozawa that ran for three volumes, while in 2013 Ryo Azuki drew Attack No. 1: Grand Challenge Chapter, which saw Kozue join the then-current Japanese Women's National Volleyball team, though I can't tell for how long this ran; considering it was a cross-promotional thing, I bet it was rather short. Considering its vintage there's no doubt that Attack No. 1's influence on sports manga (& anime) is massive, more than likely also helping inspire things over on "the other side of the tracks", i.e. shonen manga, & much like Iron Muscles would likely be another one of those "Rosetta stone" reads nowadays; luckily, Shueisha has kept the manga available via a digital option over in Japan.
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With that we come to the end of the first half of this list of iconic & influential mangaka who remain without any official English release at all, despite them all having the cachet to their respective names that make it sound like they really should have at least once. Come back next week for the other six, some of which one could argue deserve that kind of recognition even more than some of the ones mentioned here!
Sorry but I really need to be the "uhm, actually" type of person here. The Year 24 Group is made up of the female mangaka that regularly met at the Ōizumi Salon from 1970 to 1972, thus being formed by: Kēko Takemiya, Moto Haghio, Norie Masuyama, Mineko Yamada, Yumiko Ōshima, Toshie Kihara, Nanaeko Sasaya, Misako Nachi, Minori Kimura, Junko Morita, Ryōko Yamaghishi. Riyoko Ikeda has never been a part of their meetings, so she's not part of the group; and of course that goes doubly so for Hideko Mizuno, who belongs to the previous generation and was part of the Tokiwa Flat, not of the Ōizumi Salon.
ReplyDeleteThen, if you want to be really nitpicky, you can point out the Post-24 Group, made up of the next-generation mangaka who used to be assistants to the Year 24 ones and collaborated on the dōjinshi Lovely, who would be: Yasuko Sakata, Yukiko Kai, Akiko Hatsu, Aiko Itō, Shio Satō, Michi Tarasawa, Wakako Mizuki, Mari Ozawa, Fumika Okano, Takako Hashimoto.
You can check all of this information, along with countless other facts that make it a veritable treasure trove, in Kēko Takemiya's autobiographical essay "His name was Gilbert" - imo an amazing read!
Ikeda is included with the Year 24 Group by some historians & academics for reasons beyond the Oizumi Salon connection, though it is acknowledged as a divisive inclusion at points.
DeleteStating that Mizuno was also a part of it was a mistake, though, so I did correct that.