Synopsis: The story begins in 1949 Los Angeles. Kevin Yamagata, a Japanese American cartoonist, has built his career on Billy Bat, a sharp, wisecracking detective beloved by readers. But everything shifts when Kevin realizes he may have unknowingly copied the character from an image he once saw in Japan.

Determined to find the truth, Kevin returns to a devastated, postwar Japan. What he uncovers goes far beyond questions of inspiration or theft. The image of the bat is ancient, surfacing again and again across history, tied to moments of upheaval, power, and violence.

As Kevin follows the trail, he is drawn into a far-reaching mystery that blurs fiction and reality, where a single drawing may hold the key to forces shaping human history.

Review: I think it’s worth talking about Billy Bat a little bit (spoiler alert, I recommend it). It’s the first (official) English translation for this title, by a major manga creator, that is adjacent to the crime genre and contains some explicit crime fiction elements.

Naoki Urasawa is a modern manga master whose influence on the form has been widely recognized. He has some genuine masterpieces to his name (20th Century Boys, 21st Century Boys) and has written in the crime genre before (Master Keaton, Pluto, Monster). I’d like to write about Pluto and Monster at some point (once I finish reading them). For a long time, Naoki Urasawa felt that reading physical copies of manga was the ideal and preferred way he wanted his manga to be read and it’s only recently he has started to allow his works to be available digitally. Billy Bat is available both in print and digitally.

Billy Bat ran from October 2008 to August 2016. It’s something of a multi-genre story because of the different elements it contains. There are meta-fiction, historical fiction, hardboiled fiction, adventure story, conspiracy thriller elements. It is both mysterious and a mystery. At times it is playful and formally inventive.

The protag is Kevin Yamagata a comics artist. The book opens with Yamagata’s comic, called Billy Bat, a hardboiled detective story with anthropomorphic characters. It’s done in a cartoonish, four color print style. A couple of dozen pages into this Billy Bat cartoon story a more sketched, in-progress style with partial coloring briefly emerges then we see that these are pages that Yamagata is working on and the story now is in black & white with expressive characters.

Two real life coppers interrupt his work and barge in. They want to use his his apartment to spy on a suspicious tenant across the alley. When they realize he’s a famous comics artist they start looking at his pages. One of the cops says that he’s seen the main character before in Japan. Yamagata doesn’t believe it because he came up with the character himself. But he was in Japan during the war working as an interpreter for the Allied forces. He compelled to get to the bottom of this mystery and travels to post-war Japan to investigate.

Yamagata will start to find out bits of information in all sorts of places and different people. Before he knows it he’s completely sucked into a larger story. His confusion rises even higher when he wakes up next to a dead body and a stranger is offering to help.

Billy Bat volume 1 just came out in June and volume 2 is due in September. Billy Bat is wild, adventurous, compelling, suspenseful, and thrilling. The story expands pretty quickly into a large canvas with a bunch of characters and themes. I don’t know where the story goes from here (and haven’t looked for spoiler or read scanlations) but vol 1 is really good and I can’t wait to see what all happens next. It may not fully square with the crime genre, or fully be a crime story, but enough elements are there to merit this write up. This is good stuff so far.

Rating: positive/highly recommended

Availability: This is a pretty high profile release and should be easy to score: Amazon|Kindle|Hoopla|Publisher