Manga collectors rejoice: one of the most requested Naoki Urasawa projects is finally getting its long-overdue English debut. First serialized in Kodansha’s Morning magazine in October 2008, Billy Bat is among Urasawa’s most prized works, yet it has long gone without an official English translation — until now.
Polygon is debuting an exclusive preview of the release, teasing four pages from this highly sought-after series ahead of its June 2 launch through the Kana imprint of Abrams ComicArts.
As the writer and illustrator of some of the most acclaimed seinen manga ever created, including Monster, Pluto, and 20th Century Boys, Urasawa needs little introduction. Yet despite the creator’s international reputation, Billy Bat has remained one of the least accessible entries in his catalog for English readers, marking its upcoming release as all the more significant.
Billy Bat is far from a conventional shonen-style manga that’s become synonmous with the medium. The 20-volume series folds many of Urasawa’s defining fascinations into one sprawling conspiracy thriller, weaving together the moral ambiguity of Monster, the historical entanglements of Pluto, and the generational paranoia of 20th Century Boys into a story fixated on the unstable boundary between narrative and reality. For longtime readers and critics alike, Billy Bat represents one of Urasawa’s boldest achievements in metafictional puzzling.
The narrative centers on a 25-year-old cartoonist, Kevin Yamagata, whose military service in Japan during World War II eventually leads to the creation of his smash-hit comic series, “Billy Bat.” But after being accused of plagiarism in 1949, Yamagata returns to occupied Japan seeking permission to use the striking character he saw in a torn poster years earlier, the anthropomorphic, cigar-chomping detective for which the series gets its name.
One of the most compelling aspects of Billy Bat is how quickly it resists linear storytelling. It begins as a noir-tinged mystery about a comic book artist drawn into a globe-spanning conspiracy, unfolding with the tension and paranoia of Monster, replete with murders, moral compromise, and escalating suspicion. But Urasawa soon begins making increasingly bold narrative leaps, abruptly shifting the story decades into the future or past to reveal how the bat symbol reappears in different forms throughout history.
Polygon is excited to preview four pages from the upcoming English edition, featured above. The excerpts are ripped straight from Volume 1, Chapter 5, and follow Yamagata in post-World War II, occupied Japan as he attempts to uncover the origins of the bat caricature. The series’ central antagonist, Kurusu, questions Yamagata after discovering a dead body nearby.
Ravaged by guilt and haunted by a vivid dream of a supernatural Black Bat coaxing him into murder, Yamagata confesses despite having no direct involvement in the crime. To avoid possible military execution, he is pressured by Kurusu to stage the body on the train tracks to make the death appear accidental, which serves as a pivotal historical framing in the story, mimicking the real-life Shimoyama incident of 1949.
Even in its earliest chapters, Billy Bat carries the suffocating moral tension that defines Urasawa’s best work: ordinary people cornered into impossible decisions while larger, unseen forces quietly move around them. By placing Kevin within this historical moment, the story begins to suggest that the mysterious “Bat” may have a far broader and more unsettling connection to major events than it first appears.
While it may have less mainstream recognition than Urasawa’s other titles, Billy Bat remains one of his most ambitious yet. It’s not simply a mystery about uncovering hidden truths, but a story about how narratives themselves travel through history, mutate over time, and inevitably shape the people who inherit them.
The English version of Billy Bat releases on June 2
