Kodansha Comics announced its lineup of Spring 2025 print manga at its Anime Expo panel on July 4

Hiro Mashima, creator of the best-selling Fairy Tail, is back with a new fantasy adventure series, Dead Rock, set in a school for demons where the exams aren’t just brutal, they can be deadly, but the survivors of this battle royale receive their own piece of the human world.  This series is darker and more violent than Fairy Tail and is rated 16+.

Tsutomu Nihei, whose best-selling series include Blame and Knights of Sidonia, is also exploring the fantasy genre in his new series Tower Dungeon, imbuing a classic plot with his characteristic style.  The story follows a young farmhand, Yuva, who leads the Royal Guard through a multi-leveled tower in order to rescue a princess, but it is set in Nihei’s decaying, labyrinthine version of a fantasy world.  The series is rated 13+.

Minetaro Mochizuki is best known to English-language readers as the creator of the survival story Dragon Head, published by Tokyopop and then digitally by Kodansha, and the manga adaptation of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (see “Dark Horse to Publish ‘Isle of Dogs’ Manga”).  Now Kodansha has licensed one of his early works, Hauntress, a one-shot horror story first published in 1993 about a man who is stalked by a female stranger.  The manga helped introduce the concept of stalking in Japan and was voted the "Most Traumatizing Manga" in a Japanese poll. It will be rated 16+.

Shuzo Oshimi broke into the American manga scene in 2012 with The Flowers of Evil (see “Review: ‘The Flowers of Evil’ Vol. 1 TP”), and since then Kodansha has published a number of his psychological dramas. Toxic Daughter: Chi-chan is a prequel to director Eisuke Naito’s horror film Toxic Daughter; Oshimi designed the character of Chi-chan, a delinquent teen, for the film, and in the manga, which is rated 16+, he depicts the story of two classmates who set out to “save” her.

The Ayakashi Hunter’s Tainted Bride is a supernatural shojo story created by Midori Yuma (Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits) and adapted into manga by Mamenosuke Fujimaru, the creator of Alice in the Country Of... and Captive Hearts of Oz (see “New Manga from ‘Alice’ Creator”).  This story, which has been running on the KManga digital platform, is about a young woman who bears a demonic mark after a yokai attack. Her fiancé turns away from her, and she wears a mask to hide the mark, but another nobleman comes into her life and offers her a way to escape the demon’s curse.  This series is rated 16+.

Kodansha also announced several other titles, including the Naoko Takeuchi Collection edition of Codename Sailor V, the prequel to Takeuchi’s blockbuster Sailor Moon, and the buddy comedy Spacewalking with You,by Inuhiko Doronada.

They also announced two new digital licenses, both launching in July 2024: Tokyo Tarareba Girls Returns 2, a sequel to the Eisner Award-winning Tokyo Tarareba Girls, and My Journey to Her, by Yuna Hirasawa, a memoir of gender transition.

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