Ahead of this year’s installment of San-Diego Comic-Con, SEARCH & DESTROY will be released by Fantagaphics on Tuesday, July 23rd across multiple retailers in partnership with MSX: Mangasplaining Extra, the publishing initiative run by Deb Aoki, Christopher and Andrew Woodrow-Butcher spun out of the Mangasplaining podcast.
Fantagraphics describes the book.
Author Atsushi Kaneko transplants the vengeful action of Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo from feudal Japan into a dystopian post-cold-war future where mercenary robots known as “creatures” serve the human elite and victimize the city’s scrabbling, desperate masses. The violent death of one of these creatures connects an orphaned thief named Doro with a mysterious girl in a stinking animal hide that conceals deadly cybernetic implants. Who is this mysterious girl? How is she killing, one by one, the city’s most twisted and powerful creatures?
Editor Christopher Butcher offers his impressions of Search and Destroy.
“It sometimes feels a bit transgressive to be publishing Kaneko-sensei in English, because his work definitely hits very different notes than most manga in so, so many ways. A mix of action, social commentary, and full-on rage, SEARCH & DESTROY is a timely and fresh take on Tezuka-sensei’s original manga that only Atsushi Kaneko could create. This is the story of a young woman, more machine than human, hunting and stealing body parts from some pretty deplorable beings. With SEARCH & DESTROY volume one, the full scale of this mission, her actions, and their importance becomes clear and sets the stage for the intensity of the next two volumes.”
Tezuka’s tale Dororo follows the adventures of a ronin named Hyakkimaru and Dororo, an orphan who claims to be the greatest thief in Japan. Together the swordsman and his rogue sidekick travel the countryside on a quest — as they search for Hyakkimaru’s organs which were bartered away by his father to forty-eight demons in exchange for dominance on the battlefield. The original tale inspired a twenty-six episode anime in 1969 and a 24-episode anniversary series in 2019, numerous novels, a 2007 live action film directed by Akihiko Shiota, and even the cult-hit Playstation 2 videogame BLOOD WILL TELL. A four-page preview follows below.
In related news, Deb Aoki and Search and Destroy translator Ben Applegate will also be conducting a panel discussing Tezuka’s enduring legacy 35 years after his passing on Thursday of Comic-Con at 2PM, featuring a preview of another Tezuka adaptation in Unico: Awakening.
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