Peow2 has licensed three manga for English release, and the list reads like a short tour of everything mainstream publishers tend to skip. The Sweden-based publisher announced the acquisitions across Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday: Jiro Matsumoto’s Jyoshikohei, Hitoshi Tomizawa’s Alien 9, and Yasushi Nirasawa’s Phantom Core.
All three arrive in 2027, with Phantom Core first in spring and the other two following later in the year. The announcements ran on consecutive days under the publisher’s “INCOMING LICENSE” banner, one title at a time, on Bluesky and X.
Jyoshikohei: giant schoolgirl mechs, broken pilots
The series comes as three omnibus editions starting in 2027, and the first volume will include an A3-size poster with new artwork from Matsumoto. The premise is exactly as strange as the title suggests: giant high school girl mechs rule a dimensional battlefield, and piloting them drives their middle-aged male pilots insane. Takigawa’s job is hunting down the ones who go rogue.
Matsumoto launched the manga in 2011, and Shinchosha published the seventh and final volume in December 2015. English readers may know him from Velveteen & Mandala, which Vertical released, while Kodama Tales has licensed his beautiful place manga. Peow2 is betting that a completed seven-volume series with a cult reputation can find an audience now that it is being collected properly.
Alien 9 finally gets a complete English edition
Alien 9 is the one with history in English. Hitoshi Tomizawa’s manga ran from 1998 to 1999, Akita Shoten published it in three volumes, and it follows a grade school Alien Defense Force that risks its life daily to clear aliens out of the school. Sticky, slimy, and genuinely unsettling work, which is roughly how the publisher is selling it too.
The series inspired a four-episode OVA that debuted in May 2001, and Central Park Media released part of the manga in English back in 2003. That partial release is the reason Peow2 is labeling its edition Alien 9 -The Complete-. AnimEigo re-released the anime on Blu-ray on June 9, so there is fresh interest in the source material to build on.
Phantom Core brings Nirasawa’s creature work back
Two of the three are being sold as collected editions rather than a slow drip of single volumes. Jyoshikohei gets three omnibus books, and Alien 9 arrives as a complete edition. Phantom Core is the one that comes first, in spring 2027, alongside the Creature Core book that gives it context.
Phantom Core is a companion piece to Creature Core, which Peow2 is also publishing in English as a collection of works and an artbook. The story follows Phancure, a beer-loving freelance suppressor, and Nina Dolono as they hunt demented creatures. Hobby Japan originally serialized it in Hobby Japan Extra magazine.
Nirasawa’s reputation sits mostly in design and modeling for television and film, including Garo, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and several Heisei-era Kamen Rider series. He died in 2016 at 52 from kidney failure, which makes the Peow2 editions some of the more substantial English-language documentation of his creature work.
Why small-press licenses matter
Licensing announcements from small presses rarely get attention, but they decide what a decade of English manga actually looks like. Alien 9 has been half-available for over twenty years, and Jyoshikohei has never appeared in English at all. A publisher willing to commission new Matsumoto artwork for a poster is not treating these as scanlation leftovers.
It also fits a wider pattern this month, with larger houses announcing their own slates at the same time. Kodansha USA’s Print Club slate and ten new licenses landed in the same news cycle, and the two lists barely overlap in taste.
Peow2 has not announced prices or exact dates beyond spring and 2027.
Source: Peow2’s license announcements, via Anime News Network.
Featured image: Jyoshikohei artwork from Peow2’s license announcement, via Anime News Network.
