Publisher Kodama Tales announced three manga licenses on Monday, all of them aimed at 2027. The biggest name on the list is Baki Hanma, Keisuke Itagaki’s martial arts series, which arrives in July 2027.
The other two are Neo Cat, an eight-story collection by Aoka, due in June 2027, and A Mandala in Flames, a one-volume historical drama set for July 2027 alongside Baki Hanma.
Kodama Tales announced all three through its X account. None of them has a price, a format, or a page count attached yet.
Baki Hanma
This is the third arc of Itagaki’s Baki saga, the stretch where Baki goes after his father Yujiro, described in Kodama Tales’ announcement as the strongest creature on Earth, and works his way through opponents who should not be possible. Biscuit Oliva, the prison powerhouse. Pickle, the prehistoric warrior. The arc is built around the idea that every fight Baki has had was preparation for the one at the end.
For anyone who has followed the anime, this is the material the Baki Hanma seasons adapted. Getting that stretch of the manga in English at all is the notable part here. July 2027 is a long wait, and worth knowing about if you were hoping for something sooner.
Neo Cat
Aoka’s series runs on a single joke and gets eight stories out of it. Cats evolved. They walk on two legs, hold down jobs, work in host clubs, and participate in human society while remaining completely, unmistakably cats.
That is the kind of premise that lives or dies on the drawing. Aoka’s version leans on expressive feline faces against carefully drawn human spaces, and the humor comes from the gap between how seriously the cats take their jobs and how ridiculous the situation is. Eight standalone stories means you can read it in any order, which suits the material.
A painter in a burning castle
The historical one, and the most interesting of the three on paper. A painter named Hasegawa Tohaku is rejected as an apprentice by Kano Eitoku, the celebrated master of the period, and spends the story trying to make a name for himself in Kyoto. He risks his life to see Eitoku’s work inside a burning castle, and something in him restarts.
It is a single volume, complete, set against the wars of sixteenth-century Japan. Tohaku is a real painter and the story is built around the actual difficulty of being an artist in a period that had no patience for a second-best name. Historical manga about painters is rare in English, and a finished one-volume edition is an easy thing to hand someone who does not read much manga.
Three licenses, one release window
Kodama Tales is stacking June and July 2027 hard: two titles in the same month, a third the month before. For a publisher building a catalogue, that is a deliberate move. Readers who pick up one are being given an obvious second and third on the shelf next to it, across three completely different genres.
It also tells you something about where the company thinks the market is. A martial arts epic, a cat comedy, and a literary historical drama do not share an audience. Publishing them together means betting on breadth instead of depth, which is what a newer imprint has to do before it knows which of its instincts is right.
Other publishers are filling 2027 the same way. Titan Manga has five series lined up for the year, and Seven Seas picked up Sagrada Reset, Two Cats and a Dog and three more titles in a single announcement.
The Baki license is the one with the built-in audience, and it will probably pay for the other two. That is how catalogues get built.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Kodama Tales’ X account.
Featured image: Promotional artwork for the Kodama Tales license announcements, via Kodama Tales’ X account and Anime News Network.
