MANGA: Search and Destroy Ch.05, by Atsushi Kaneko

Continuing the flashback from Chapter 4, with the origins of Hyaku.

Hello everyone, welcome to chapter five of Atsushi Kaneko’s Search and Destroy, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka. This week’s chapter is paywalled for paid subscribers to MSX: Mangasplaining Extra. You can catch up with chapter one here and see the index for all of our manga series’ here. If you just want this week’s chapter of Search and Destroy and to skip the essay below, scroll down to the title.

Read Chapter: 00-01 | 02 | 03 | 04

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We’ve been waxing pretty poetic about the incredible manga creator that is Atsushi Kaneko, and if you’ve been enjoying Search and Destroy as much as we do, well, I bet you know why. It always struck me as bizarre (hi it’s Chris) that Kaneko’s work continued to be overlooked by North American manga publishers, and it was so thrilling that we got to be the one of the first* to bring his work to North America, in partnership with Fantagraphics.

You can pre-order Search and Destroy Volume 1 in print from Fantagraphics now.

So all of that said, Atsushi Kaneko’s newest manga is getting a live-action adaptation that debuts this week in Japan! It’s the manga he created immediately following Search and Destroy and well…

Note: Content Warning: Self-Harm.

It’s an adaptation of his new manga EVOL, which is currently at six incredibly beautifully drawn volumes in Japan, and is licensed in every country in the world except for… well, North America. There’s even an additional special edition in France, an oversized HC. It’s about a group of teens who are treated not great by society, and their deaths become the trigger for… superheroic powers? Except they’re not feeling particularly generous towards a society that let them (or caused them) to die? Hence: EVOL. It’s so very exciting, and I’m thrilled for Kaneko-sensei that he got this adaptation!

Now, I wish I had some great news to share with you here, that EVOL is a secret new license announcement from us… But I don’t, and it isn’t. I’d love to be able to run it on MSX, but at 6 volumes and counting it’s a bit long for us and our current print partners. I wish I could make a go for licensing but it’s out of our reach right now, my sincere apologies. But that said, if there were any way we could partner with someone to do this, well, uh, hit us up, we’d love to talk.

You can order it from Amazon Japan

Anyway, I bring it up because we were browsing Kaneko-sensei’s Twitter today, and he shared this photo of the billboard for EVOL in Shibuya’s internationally renowned “Scramble Crossing”, on the night that Tokyo Police desperately tried to keep Halloween from, uh, happening. It’s a perfect punk photo and moment.

Photo by 森泉岳土くん.

Quick! Protect the masses from the horrors of Halloween drinking!

I full-on laughed at this and thought I would share it. It sometimes feels a bit transgressive to be publishing Kaneko-sensei in English, because his work definitely hits very different notes than most North American manga in so, so many ways. Photos like this reinforce that feeling, and it’s a good one. While EVOL the TV series isn’t going to be available outside of Japan, our Japanese readers (ahem) can watch the entire series on DMM TV starting this Friday. As for the manga? Well, uh, learn French I guess?

• Christopher

* I said up top that we’re one of the first to translate Kaneko-sensei into English, because back in 2005 DMP Publishing published 2 of the 4 volumes of Atsushi Kaneko’s earliest work, Bambi and Her Pink Gun. North America wasn’t ready for punk-rock manga back then, but we think it juuuust might be now. Shout-out to the OGs who have loved and followed Kaneko-sensei since then.

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Search and Destroy - Chapter 05

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