Hachi Report! June 2026

Welcome to Hachi Report, a monthly newsletter breaking down recent developments in the manga and manhwa world! Thanks to the efforts of our hardworking delivery fox Hachi, we have all the information you need about upcoming comics, new and notable events, and backstage publisher maneuvering. This month: embarrassing social media posting, a new kids imprint at TOKYOPOP, and the staff at Dark Horse form a union.

Licensing Highlights

Terrarium in a Drawer

Writer/Artist: Ryoko Kui
Publisher: Yen Press
Debut: November 2026

Synopsis: Welcome to a wonderland of laughter, tears, surprise, and empathy. From Ryoko Kui, author of Delicious in Dungeon, comes an award-winning kaleidoscope of thirty-three short, shining tales of comedy, fantasy, sci-fi, and more!

The Pitch: Last month I wrote, “hopefully we see Terrarium in Drawer in English one day as well.” Here it is! This collection put Kui on the map, so I’m unreasonably excited for it.

He Was My Brother

Writer/Artist: Minoru Matsuda
Publisher: Yen Press
Debut: November 2026

Synopsis: In the high heat of summer, Kanoko visits her brother’s grave. By her side is Hijiri, her brother’s lover—and the man she has fallen in love with. But memories aren’t the only things that can haunt the living. This is the story of the twisted love between a girl, her brother’s partner, and the thing that was once her brother…

The Pitch: This series was nominated for the Next Manga Awards for web comics two years in a row, in 2022 and 2023. Worth a shot for fans of “brought back wrong” series like I Want to Hold Aono-kun So Badly I Could Die.

Brothers of Japan

Writer/Artist: Taiyo Matsumoto
Publisher: Manga Mavericks Books
Debut: February 2027

Synopsis: An essential collection from the acclaimed creator of Ping Pong and Tekkonkinkreet, featuring 11 early stories that showcase the raw foundations of Taiyo Matsumoto’s artistic universe.

The Pitch: Manga Mavericks scored a collection of early short comics by one of my favorite artists?! From Matsumoto’s blurb: “it…contains soft and painful expressions that only young people can draw and I’m fond of it.”

Tie Me Up, Stare Me Down

Writer/Artist: Zawayuki Taki
Publisher: Manga Mavericks Books
Debut: May 25th, 2027

Synopsis: To be free, you must first be tied down and stare into your captor’s eyes…

Sawada finds himself crushed by the responsibilities and expectations that come with being in charge of the sales and marketing department of a grocery store chain. One night, when looking for a place to drink and relax, he spots a sign for a “Fetish Bar.” Upon opening the doors to this bar, he’s greeted by the sight of women in bondage! When Nana, the queen of the bar, gives him “special” care, Sawada experiences a sense of liberation and pleasure he never thought possible.

The world of dominating and being dominated unfurls at the sound of a whip and the sensation of a rope tightening.

The Pitch: Manga Mavericks’s first big venture into horny comics, translated by rope play expert Victoria Esnard. I’ve read good things about this one online; hopefully it does well!

Antengai: Twilight Metropolis

Writer/Artist: Tsubonari
Publisher: Kana
Debut: Spring 2027

Synopsis: From avante-garde illustrator Tsubonari comes a full-color retro encyclopedia-manga fusion that details the perseverance and lives of residents of a grim, decadent city… Not for the faint of heart.

The Pitch: “Full-color retro encyclopedia-manga fusion” sounds good to me. The translator Faye Duxovni also said via Bluesky, “It’s such a hauntingly gorgeous and imaginative series, and I can’t wait for everyone to pay this city a visit!”

Breaking News

Yusuke Murata Draws Controversy With Racist X Post

Eyeshield 21 and One Punch Man artist Yusuke Murata responded to a post on X featuring a video of far-right British activist Tommy Robinson claiming that Pakistanis in the UK “are responsible for 33% of child defects at birth” alongside images of faces. Anime News Network translated his response as: “They have small heads, high noses, and thin lips. They look like the Moai statues. Aren’t they descended from primitives?” At this time, the post has received over 800 replies and been shared over 4,000 times.

While this is the first time that Murata’s politics have gone viral on the English speaking internet, they’ve been an open secret in Japan for years. Digging through his past tweets reveal references to the Ancient Aliens and Simulation Hypotheses. He also follows far-right accounts including the anti-globalism account @hide_Q_.

Meanwhile, Japan’s small but growing Muslim population is hard at work building community as they endure pushback from some residents (per The Asashi Shinbun.) This is despite the recent success of Japan’s anti-immigration party Sanseito, which won 14 seats in Japan’s upper house election last year in July 2025. Murata’s comments should remind us that anti-immigrant conservatism is not just an issue in Japan but a global movement uniting people across the world.

Manga and manga artists have always been political. Some, like Naoki Urasawa, proudly display their politics in the pages of their work. Others, like the late Yu-Gi-Oh! artist Kazuki Takahashi, advocate for politics outside of their manga. In this respect Murata’s words are nothing new. They certainly are embarrassing, though!

Kodansha Announces Winners of 50th Manga Awards

Per Anime News Network, Kodansha announced the winners of its 50th Manga Awards. They include Kei Urana and Hideyoshi Ando’s punk action series Gachiakuta for Best Shonen Manga; Eiko Mutsuhana, Yugiri Aika and Gin Shirakawa’s reincarnation romance Re-Living My Life with a Boyfriend Who Doesn’t Remember Me for Best Shojo Manga; and Shun Umezawa’s contemporary thriller The Darwin Incident for Best General Manga. All three series are currently available in English from Kodansha Comics, Seven Seas and Vertical Comics respectively.

Past Kodansha Manga Awards winners include Coco Uzuki’s Fall In Love, Your False Angels (Best Shojo Manga 2025) and Misaki Takamatsu’s Skip and Loafer (Best General Manga 2023.) Most are titles published by Kodansha, although not all; Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, which is published by Shogakukan, won the Best Shonen Award in 2024.

Comic-Con Announces 2026 Eisner Award Nominees

Comic-Con announced the nominees for the 2026 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, an annual celebration of comics and graphic novels published in the United States. While the majority of these awards go to writers and artists within the US comics industry, a handful as always recognize manga and manhwa. The Best U.S. Edition Of International Material–Asia category picked the first volume of Kazumi Yamashita’s excellent series Land, as well as two different series by Keigo Shinzo: Hirayasumi and Tokyo Alien Bros. Yamashita was also nominated for Best Writer/Artist, a rarity for the Eisners. (The only manga artist to ever win the Best Writer/Artist Award is Junji Ito in 2021.)

Other nominees include Rintaro’s My Life in 24 Frames Per Second (Best Graphic Memoir), Yudori’s Raging Clouds (Best U.S. Edition of International Material) and Akira Volumes 1-5 Hardcover Collection (Best Archival Collection/Project—Comic Books.) The late John Lent’s Comic Art in Korea, as well as Andrea Horbinski’s Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905–1989, were nominated for Best Academic/Scholarly Work. The Art of Manga and Fruits Basket: The Complete Box Set were nominated for Best Publication Design. Additionally, Devilman artist Go Nagai was chosen by the judges for the Eisner Hall of Fame.

Da Vinci Magazine Ends Print Serialization

Per scrmbl, the Kadokawa published magazine Da Vinci is ending print serialization with its November issue, to be published October 6th. Kadokawa claims that changes in publishing, as well as a wider variety of options for modern readers, are responsible for the change. The web version of Da Vinci will continue in the meantime. “In fact,” says scrmbl, “there are plans to strengthen this online content in place of the magazine going forward.”

Da Vinci was founded in 1994 under Recruit Co. and run by Media Factory. Kadokawa purchased Media Factory in 2011, then folded it into itself in 2013. Da Vinci itself features interviews, polls and yearly lists among other things. The magazine commemorates not just manga but books as a whole. While it’s reassuring that Kadokawa intends to continue the magazine online rather than shut it down, the media landscape these days remains chaotic, and there are no guarantees.

Fanfare/Ponent Mon Commemorates Mount Everest Anniversary With Jiro Taniguchi

Per Comics Beat, Fanfare/Ponent Mon is reprinting three works illustrated by artist Jiro Taniguchi this year to commemorate “the anniversary of the first recorded ascent of Mount Everest.” These include The Summit of the Gods, the story of a man who finds a camera that once belonged to missing mountaineer George Mallory; The Quest for the Missing Girl, a mystery about a mountaineer searching for an absent teenager; and The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories, a collection of comics featuring various wild animals. Summit of the Gods is set for July 2026, while “no release date has been set for the other works…”

Additionally, Fanfare/Ponent Mon is reprinting Hideo Azuma’s award-winning manga memoir Disappearance Diary as well as Kiriko Nananan’s Blue.

TOKYOPOP Launches New Kids Imprint

TOKYOPOP announced on its site that it is launching a new children’s imprint called TOKYOPOP Kids. “This new imprint will deliver engaging, age-appropriate content that combines the visual appeal of manga with storytelling themes relevant to today’s early and middle-grade readers,” says TOKYOPOP COO and publisher Marc Visnick. Per Publisher’s Weekly, the imprint’s initial slate includes graphic novels (Paulina Palacios’s As Yubooh Slumbers, Victor Nordahl’s Wild Paws), picture books (Toshiyuki Fukuda’s That Girl, Jungyoon Huh and Soyoung Lee’s A Tree Swing to Soar) and chapter books (Taiga Kayama’s Nightmare Library.) There will also be Spanish language versions of As Yuuboh Slumbers as well as Courtney Carbone’s Barbie and Teresa: The Secret Recipe.

Since relaunching in 2015, TOKYOPOP has worked to refurbish its reputation by licensing great manga series like Double and Since I Could Die Tomorrow. It’s almost but not quite enough to forget how it left comics artists in the lurch following the collapse of its OEL division in 2011. While founder Stu Levy claims that “there was no such thing as original English manga until we created it,” former TOKYOPOP artist Sophie Campbell figured that (per Anime Herald) the company held “onto everyone’s rights partly so that even if they became insolvent or completely collapsed…they could sell off the catalog of properties to another party and make a quick cash grab before they crashed and burned.”

TOKYOPOP has since gone through significant turnover, including Levy switching from “day to day operations” to “overall group strategy” per Anime News Network. Despite this, the company continues to indulge in behavior reminiscent of old-school TOKYOPOP, like encouraging fans to invest in the company. While the manga industry is in a different place now then it was in 2011, my hope would be that artists signing with the new version of TOKYOPOP learn from their predecessors and read their contracts very carefully.

Dark Horse Forms Union With Communication Workers of America

Staff at the Oregon comics publisher Dark Horse announced on May 27th that they are founding a union with Communication Workers of America. According to their website, they asserted in a letter to interim CEO Jay Komas that “the looming uncertainty from recent layoffs, wage/hiring freeze, change in leadership power, emergence of artificial intelligence, and return-to-office policies (despite their economic impact on employees) have fueled us to organize and collectively address our concerns.” If Komas does not recognize the union by June 3rd, “Dark Horse Workers United will petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election.”

Dark Horse’s catalog is among the most impressive in the United States comics industry, featuring books by Mike Mignola, Geof Darrow and Mike Allred among others. Its manga division includes titles like Blade of the Immortal that it acquired from Studio Proteus, as well as the beloved dark fantasy series Berserk. Despite this prestige, though, the company also has experienced its share of controversy. Editor Scott Allie was accused in a 2015 Graphics Policy article of assaulting two people at a party during San Diego Comic Con. It wasn’t until 2020, when former Dark Horse editor Shawna Gore came forward about her own sexual abuse at the hands of Allie, that Dark Horse finally removed Allie from his position.

In 2021, Swedish video game and media holding company Embracer Group entered into an agreement to acquire Dark Horse Media. (It completed the buyout in 2022.) After going on a buying spree, purchasing multiple studios across the games industry including Eidos, Saber Interactive and Crystal Dynamics, Embracer later cut 4532 employees (27% of the company’s workforce, says Eurogamer) from its combined operations to make up for its debt. With former Dark Horse CEO Mike Richardson having left the company this March, it’s no surprise that employees are taking measures to protect themselves.

Dark Horse isn’t the only publishing house facing unionization either. Late last April, employees at Hachette announced that they had formed Hachette’s Workers Coalition with Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild-CWA Local 32035. Hachette refused to recognize the union, and so an election has been scheduled in New York City on June 9th and 10th. (Mail in will be counted from June 9th to July 6th.) Could this be a red hot union summer? While we are seeing this play out at publishers in the United States rather than Japan, it’s very likely this will continue to affect the manga industry. After all, your favorite books are brought to you not by companies or corporations, but by the people working for them.

Hachi Snacks

• For The Comics Journal, Bart Beaty wrote an obituary remembering comics scholar John Lent.
• Also for The Comics Journal, Helen Chazan wrote an obituary remembering Kiriko Nananan, the artist of Blue.
• For Anime News Network, Jairus Taylor wrote about the Shonen Jump mafia series Reborn! as well as its anime adaptation.
• For scrmbl, Jacob Parker-Dalton interviewed Hyuganatsu, the author of mystery series The Apothecary Diaries.
• For Strict Algorithm LLC, Sakaki interviewed Minoru Toyoda of the series Draw This, then Die!

ICYMI (In Case You Missed It)

Meanwhile, don’t forget to check out these Yatta-Tachi articles:

• June 2026 Manga, Manhwa, Light Novel, & Book Releases
• June 2026 BL / Yaoi Manga, Manhwa, Manhua, Danmei, & Light Novel Releases in Print