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Onihei's Shōtarō Ikenami Launches New Manga
posted on by Rafael Antonio Pineda
The October issue of Bungeishunju's Comic Ran Twins magazine revealed on Monday that Shōtarō Ikenami and Yūsuke Ochiai will launch a new manga titled Kyōkaku (The Vigilante) in the magazine's next issue on October 13.
The manga is based on Ikenami's serialized novel of the same name, and centers on the historical figure Banzuiin Chōbei, an outlaw in Japan's Edo period that fought against injustice alongside his gang of ronin.
Ikenami is the author of the Onihei Crime Reports in Edo (Onihei Hankachō) novel series. Ikenami serialized the story in Bungeishunju's Ōru Yomimono novel magazine from 1967 to 1989, and Bungeishunju published 19 volumes for the main story. Later paperback reprints divided the story into 24 volumes. The serialized novels inspired the first live-action television adaptation in 1969, as well as three subsequent series and a 1995 live-action film. The novels also inspired a television anime adaptation (pictured at right) that premiered in January 2017, and streamed on Amazon Prime Video's now-defunct Anime Strike channel.
The Onihei novels inspired an ongoing manga adaptation by Sentarō Kubota and Takao Saitō, which launched in Bungeishunju's Comic Ran magazine in 1993. JManga partially published the manga in North America.
Source: Comic Ran Twins October issue
