Long-Awaited Billy Bat Manga Finally Gets Official English Release

The eager fans of Billy Bat by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki manga series have some excellent news now- there will be an official English release. It has now been formally announced by Kana, the manga imprint of Abrams ComicArts, that the first English volume will be released on June 2, 2026.

It is planned to have 20 volumes and four releases of each volume per year.

By the announcement, Kana will print all the 20 volumes of the series as they release four volumes of the same each year up to the full 20 volumes. This will be a significant breakthrough in the affairs of international readers as they have been yearning to read this praised mystery-thriller in English.

Synopsis

Set in post-war Los Angeles in 1949, the narrative describes the adventures of Kevin Yamagata, a Japanese-American comic book author, whose superhero Billy Bat is a cartoonish creature with a dark costume, a battered fedora, and a surname which is also a homophone of the words bat and bat. Kevin however has his world turned upside down when he learns that there were chances strong enough that he may have inadvertently plagiarized the character in a drawing that he had come acrosses in Japan. Insistent in settling the truth, he goes back to the war-torn Japan to discover that the roots of Billy Bat are rather ancient and unknown than it thought before.

History and Heritage

Billy Bat was first serialized in the Morning magazine by Kodansha between 2008 and 2016 in a total of 20 books. Urasawa and Nagasaki have often worked on other award-winning series, such as Master Keaton and Pluto.

This official publication is a major milestone to English manga fans who have longed to read the series since years ago and were only reading it illegally.

Source: The Beat, Crunchyroll News