Manga Mavericks Books has licensed Sho Yonoko’s Gago Hunters, the company said on Monday during its online event. The full title is Gago Hunters: Greetings from Amatsumizu City’s Gago Suppression Squad, and the release is set for July 2027 in print and digital.
The series is a comedy about a town with a monster problem and no budget to fix it. Amatsumizu looks ordinary, but the creatures called Gago outnumber the residents. The mayor wants a crack squad of exterminators and cannot afford one, so he drafts four ordinary citizens instead: Umeko the hair stylist, Mii the cashier, Hiromi the high school student, and Yuuri, Umeko’s apprentice. None of them volunteered. Each of them, it turns out, is not quite normal.
Yonoko’s manga started on HERO’S Web in September 2023. The sixth collected volume shipped in Japan on July 6 of this year, so the English release will arrive with a decent amount of material waiting behind it.
A small press with a clear plan
Manga Mavericks Books is the publishing arm of the Manga Mavericks website and podcast, which set the imprint up in April 2025 to license, localize and distribute work from independent Japanese creators. That is a different brief from the one the big houses work to. Yen Press announced ten titles at MCM London this week, and most of that list is built around established sellers. An outfit the size of Manga Mavericks Books can pick up a six-volume web manga that nobody has brought over, and it does not need a hit to keep going.
The company also showed a variant cover for its February 2027 edition of Taiyo Matsumoto’s Brothers of Japan, the series Magazine House published in Japan. That cover will only be sold through the company’s own store. It is a familiar move for small presses trying to turn podcast listeners into direct buyers, and it keeps the margin on each copy instead of handing it to a distributor.
Why HERO’S Web keeps turning up
HERO’S Web is the web platform run by HERO’S Inc., and its catalogue has become a steady source of licences for English publishers over the last few years. The site publishes series that would struggle in a print magazine, which means the titles tend to be odd and mid-length rather than formulaic.
Gago Hunters fits that profile exactly. A genre premise with a comic spin, six volumes in, no anime, no huge following. For a young imprint, that is a low-risk test of whether its audience will follow it from podcasts into book buying. Publishers of this size tend to build a list the way Dark Horse did at New York Comic Con this month: a few titles at a time, chosen for a specific readership rather than for the widest possible one.
What is still unknown
No translator, price, page count or trim size has been announced, and July 2027 is a long way out. It is also unclear whether the release starts from volume one on its own or bundles several at once. With six volumes already out in Japan, a steady bimonthly schedule would make more sense than a single omnibus, but that is a guess.
The announcement mentioned physical and digital without naming storefronts, so which platforms will carry it remains open.
Readers who want a sample now can find the Japanese chapters on HERO’S Web. There is no official English version of the series yet.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Manga Mavericks Books
Featured image: Art for Sho Yonoko’s Gago Hunters, licensed in English by Manga Mavericks Books, via Anime News Network.
