Kodansha Comics will speed up the releases of its best-selling soccer manga Blue Lock to a monthly schedule starting in July 2025, the publisher announced at New York Comic Con last weekend.  Kodansha has published 27 volumes digitally in English and will release Vol. 15 in print on October 29, 2024.  In February 2024 it was named as one of the fastest growing manga in the U.S. (see “Circana BookScan: Fastest Growing Manga Series”).  The Japanese edition is currently 31 volumes long and still ongoing, and Kodansha will release the print volumes monthly until they are caught up with the Japanese releases.  The first volume of the prequel Blue Lock: Episode Nagi was released on October 15, 2024.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic Akira will be available as individual hardcover volumes in the original right-to-left format, starting in fall 2025.  Akira was one of the first manga to be published in English, first by the Marvel Comics imprint Epic Comics as digitally colored comics and collections and then by Dark Horse Comics as black and white volumes. Both editions were reformatted to read left to right.  The currently available paperbacks, published by Kodansha and based on the Dark Horse edition, also read left to right.  In 2017, Kodansha released the six-volume series as a hardcover box set, restoring the original reading order as well as the sound effects, which had been replaced with translations in the earlier editions (see “‘Akira: 35th Anniversary Box Set’”), but the hardcovers have only been available as a box set until now.

Kodansha also announced it will reprint the original 2-in-1 omnibus volumes of The Drops of God, which is available digitally but has been out of print for years.  The series was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2012 and was recently adapted into a live-action series that was nominated for a 2024 International Emmy Award; a second season of the TV show is in the works.