Hiroya Oku, the creator of Gantz, Inuyashiki and GIGANT, has confirmed that he wrote and drew the manga Thunder 3 under the pen name Yuki Ikeda.
Oku made the confirmation on social media on Thursday. His reason was straightforward: he wanted to preserve a surprise in the first chapter for readers coming to the series cold, a twist that would have been weakened if the Hiroya Oku name had been printed on the cover.
What Thunder 3 is
Kodansha USA publishes the series in English and describes it as follows:
Three ordinary schoolboys come into possession of a DVD that supposedly opens a gateway to a parallel universe, but when their backs are turned Pyontaro’s little sister Futaba passes through and gets kidnapped by the aliens that have overrun that version of Earth. Discovering that their cartoonish bodies make them supermen in the hyper-realistic parallel universe, the boys set out to rescue Futaba.
Ikeda launched Thunder 3 in Kodansha’s Monthly Shonen Magazine in May 2022. The series entered its climax in January 2025, then went on hiatus in March that year because of Ikeda’s health. It returned from hiatus in February and ended on June 5. Kodansha published the manga’s 10th volume on August 17, and Kodansha USA shipped the eighth volume on February 10.
The anime
A Thunder 3 anime premiered on the +Ultra programming block on Fuji TV and other channels on July 8 at 24:45 JST — effectively July 9 at 12:45 a.m. The series streams exclusively worldwide on Netflix.
Oku’s next steps
Oku announced in an interview with Courrier Japon in August that he plans to retire after finishing his latest manga, Kanrekihime (The Sweet Sixty Princess). He launched that series in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Superior in December 2025, and Shogakukan published its first compiled volume on May 29.
His best-known work, Gantz, ran from 2000 to 2013 and spawned a television anime, a CG anime film, two Japanese live-action films and two spinoff manga. Dark Horse Comics released the manga in North America. Oku launched the historical spinoff GANTZ:E with artist Jin Kagetsu in January 2020, and Shueisha’s Jump TOON vertical-scrolling service launched a full-colour vertical edition titled GANTZ:T in July 2025. Deadline reported in November 2021 that a Hollywood live-action adaptation was in development.
Why it matters
Pen names are common in manga, but a creator of Oku’s profile hiding behind one for a full four-year, ten-volume run is unusual — and it says something about how the industry’s biggest names think about reader expectation. A famous byline is a marketing asset, but it is also a spoiler: readers who know an author’s habits start looking for the trick before the first chapter ends.
For Oku specifically, the reveal lands at a neat moment. Thunder 3 has just finished its run, its anime adaptation is out on Netflix, and the creator has publicly signalled that his next series will be his last. The pen-name confession functions as a small postscript to a completed series rather than a marketing stunt for an ongoing one.
For more manga news, see our reports on Norimitsu Kaiho’s Akarui Mirai ending on October 23 and My Tiny Senpai’s planned conclusion in April 2027.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Hiroya Oku’s and Thunder 3’s official X accounts
Featured image: Artwork from the Thunder 3 manga, via Anime News Network.
