Yen Press Launches New Manga Imprint With Ryoko Kui Collection
The October launch pairs a proven hitmaker with a title already tapped for an anime adaptation by Rie Matsumoto, giving the unnamed imprint an immediate two-pronged push into both bookstore shelves and future multimedia visibility.
Reporting from 2 sources: Yatta-Tachi, The Comics Journal.
Yen Press will debut a new imprint in October 2026, launching with two titles. The first is Ryoko Kui's The Dragon School is Atop the Mountain, an early collection of one-shots from the Delicious in Dungeon creator that treats the extraordinary as ordinary daily life. The second is Futa Kimura's Fate Rewinder: All Great Feats Require Time, a children's manga about agents who use micro-time machines implanted in their eye sockets to rescue people from tragic deaths. The imprint arrives as part of a broader wave of licensing news. Glacier Bay Books will publish Marco Kohinata's Akari in June 2026, a standalone story about mistaken identity and found family selected for the MINT manga initiative. Mangalith will release Hideko Mizuno's Fire! on October 14, 2026, bringing the 1969 shojo manga that helped open the genre's 1970s flourishing to English readers in a single volume. Kodama Tales will publish Hisae Iwaoka's The Magical Forest of Hoshigahara in November 2026. Manga Mavericks Books will release Minami Q-ta's Ball and Chain in March 2027, a story about two queer people pushing back against assigned gender roles and the expectations of marriage. The licensing announcements follow the death of Yoshiharu Tsuge on an unspecified date. Tsuge, born October 30, 1937, was the creator of the surrealist manga Nejishiki and an artist who twisted the medium with an uncompromising personal vision shaped by postwar poverty and lifelong anthropophobia.
Yen Press has not yet named the imprint, but the two launch titles share an October 2026 window. The publisher is positioning the line with a built-in media hook: Rie Matsumoto is already attached to direct an anime adaptation of Futa Kimura's Fate Rewinder: All Great Feats Require Time. Matsumoto's previous directing credits include Kyousougiga and the 2014 feature Kekkai Sensen, though the source pieces did not name a studio or air date for the new project.
Ryoko Kui's collection, The Dragon School is Atop the Mountain, gathers one-shots that predate her earlier English-language release Seven Little Sons of the Dragon. The Yatta-Tachi report notes that fans have also been waiting on a translation of Kui's Terrarium in Drawer, a title that remains unlicensed. The same report describes Fate Rewinder as a children's manga built around the Spacetime Strategic Enforcement Unit, agents who use Retry Eyes, "micro-time machines implanted in their eye sockets," to loop through rescue attempts until a case is solved.
Separately, the cluster carries a long remembrance of Yoshiharu Tsuge published by The Comics Journal. The piece traces Tsuge's childhood through postwar poverty in Katsushika Ward, Tokyo. His father, a head chef at the Chiyoya Ryokan, died of Addison's disease in 1942. His mother took a job in a munitions factory, and Tsuge himself began working in an electroplating plant at thirteen. The article identifies the artist's lifelong anthropophobia and erythrophobia as forces that pushed him toward solitary drawing. Ryan Holmberg supplied the English translations for the Drawn and Quarterly edition of Nejishiki that the Journal excerpts.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 2 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- Yatta-Tachi Hachi Report! May 2026
- The Comics Journal Yoshiharu Tsuge, 1937-2026