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PictureBox Adds Osamu Tezuka's The Mysterious Underground Men Manga

The comics news website The Comics Reporter announced on Tuesday that North American publisher PictureBox has added Osamu Tezuka's The Mysterious Underground Men manga as the second title in the company's recently-announced "Ten Cent Manga" line, which will focus on "mass-produced genre works in Japanese postwar comics."

According to The Comics Reporter, The Mysterious Underground men will ship in a 160-page hardcover book in October 2013. PictureBox representative Dan Nadel and the Ten Cent Manga editor and translator Ryan Holmberg described the book as follows:

While Tezuka Osamu's New Treasure Island (1946-47) was the first major hit for the "god of manga," the artist himself regarded a later book the first of his signature "story manga." Originally published in Osaka in 1948, The Mysterious Underground Men tells the story of Mimio the talking rabbit, as he struggles to prove his humanity while helping his friends save earth from an invasion of angry humanoid ants. Inspired by Bernhard Kellermann's Der Tunnel (1913) and drawing widely on European and American science fiction, as well as Milt Gross' own pioneering "graphic novel," He Done Her Wrong (1930), this full-color edition of The Mysterious Underground Men will not only introduce to English-language readers a founding monument in modern Japanese comics. It will also offer a rare glimpse at the wide-ranging Western cultural sources that made up young Tezuka's world.

The first book in PictureBox's new line is Shigeru Sugiura's 1974 manga adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans historical novel. PictureBox confirmed with ANN earlier this month that the book will ship on April 30, but The Comics Reporter has noted that the book will now ship in May.

Thanks to Vito Plahuta for the news tip.