The editorial department of Kadokawa’s Young Ace magazine apologized last week after admitting it used Ieri Komen’s character designs in a manga adaptation without her permission. The apology, posted through the magazine’s Web Ace channel, covers Kei Natsumi’s manga version of Rokakoen’s novel Pitch-Black Infatuation (Shikkoku no Bojo).
The short version: two characters who appear in the adaptation were drawn using designs Komen created for a different series, and two more characters plus a background location turned out to be affected as well. Nobody asked her.
Who is responsible
Young Ace put the responsibility entirely on itself. The editorial department stated that permission is normally secured before a manga serialization begins, and that this time it was not. It also said the original novel author, Rokakoen, and the manga artist, Kei Natsumi, bear no responsibility for the error. Komen received a direct apology.
That framing matters, because the timeline the department published shows the mistake was organizational rather than personal.
How it happened
Natsumi began pre-production on the Pitch-Black Infatuation manga in August 2025. Young Ace wanted to use Komen’s designs for two characters, Rumi Sasaki and Yukiyoshi Aoyama, who appear in both stories. That overlap is not a coincidence. Pitch-Black Infatuation is set in the same world as Rokakoen’s earlier novel Festival of Heresies, and Komen drew the manga adaptation of that one.
So Young Ace went to the Kadokawa Horror Bunko editorial department, which publishes both Rokakoen novels, and asked for permission to use those designs. The reply that came back was that it would probably also be fine to use original character designs. That is vague enough to be read as a yes by anyone who wants a yes.
Young Ace took it as one. The department passed the answer to Natsumi and the manga moved forward using Komen’s designs as reference, with no permission from Komen herself at any point.
Komen found out after the first collected volume shipped on August 4. She contacted Young Ace, and the review that followed found the problem was wider than the two characters the magazine had originally asked about. The designs for Ishigami and Emi Shimamoto had also been used, along with a background location.
The two source novels
Festival of Heresies (Itan no Shukusai) came out in May 2021 and Pitch-Black Infatuation in February 2022, both under Kadokawa Horror Bunko. Yen Press brought both to English readers, the first in November 2024 and the second in August 2025.
Komen’s manga adaptation of Festival of Heresies launched on Kadokawa’s Comic Walker in July 2023 and wrapped with a second volume in November 2025. Natsumi’s Pitch-Black Infatuation manga began in Young Ace on March 4 of this year.
Why this one landed harder than most
Small rights errors happen in publishing constantly, and most of them get resolved in an email. This one became public because the artist who was not asked to be involved went straight to the magazine, and because the explanation the magazine gave included a paper trail pointing at another Kadokawa department.
For freelance manga artists, the episode is a reminder that “reference” is doing a lot of work in a lot of production conversations. Using another artist’s character designs in a commercial serialization is licensing, whether or not the drawings get traced. The characters Rumi Sasaki and Yukiyoshi Aoyama belong to a shared world, which makes the borrowing feel natural inside the story and does nothing to change the legal situation outside it.
For readers, the practical question is what happens to volume one. Kadokawa has not announced a recall, a reprint with revised art, or any change to the digital edition. The apology is public and specific, which is more than most publishers manage, but the book on shelves still contains the pages in question.
There is also a pattern worth naming. Kadokawa is a large publisher with a lot of imprints, and this error happened at the seam between two of them. Young Ace and Horror Bunko both did something reasonable in isolation. One asked for permission. The other gave an answer that sounded like permission. Nobody in the chain was assigned to get an actual signature from the artist whose work was about to be used.
Young Ace says it will handle permissions properly from here. Whether that means a written approval step for cross-imprint character use is not something the statement addresses. It is worth comparing with the Ochibure Zeus to Dorei no Ko move between publishers and the way Kaoru Mori’s shift to a new publisher was handled, both of which went through formal channels.
Featured image: Pitch-Black Infatuation volume 1 cover, manga by Kei Natsumi from Rokakoen’s original story, via Anime News Network.
