Nakama Press will publish Uoto’s 100 Meters in English for the first time, beginning with two volumes in 2027. The Mad Cave Studios imprint announced the license on Thursday alongside a second pickup, Buichi Terasawa’s Goku Midnight Eye.
100 Meters volume 1 arrives on February 17, 2027, with volume 2 following on April 27. Goku Midnight Eye‘s first volume lands on March 2. Nakama shared the cover and a set of English-language pages for 100 Meters in the announcement.
The Japanese edition of 100 Meters runs five volumes in total, so the 2027 slate covers less than half the series. Nakama has not said when volumes 3 through 5 will follow.
What 100 Meters is
Uoto serialized Hyakuemu on Kodansha’s Magazine Pocket app from November 2018 to August 2019. It was the artist’s first series, and Kodansha collected it into five volumes, the last of which shipped in October 2019.
The story follows two sprinters. Togashi has the talent; Komiya has the work ethic and an obsession with the 100-meter dash that starts the day he meets Togashi. Uoto went on to create Chi: On the Movements of the Earth, which is the work most English-speaking readers know the name from.
The film did the heavy lifting
Kenji Iwaisawa, who directed ON-GAKU: Our Sound, adapted the manga into a feature at Rock ‘n’ Roll Mountain. The film opened in Japan in September 2025 and finished eighth in its opening weekend with 102,666,040 yen over three days. It premiered at Annecy in June 2025, screened across North America that October in both subtitled and dubbed versions, and took runner-up for Best Animated Film at the Florida Film Critics Circle Awards.
GKIDS releases the film on Blu-ray on December 1, with a collector’s edition that includes five art cards, a mini-poster and an interview with Iwaisawa. That gives the manga a useful runway: the disc arrives in December, the first volume in February.
Goku Midnight Eye comes back around
Terasawa’s series ran in Gentosha’s Comic Burger from 1987 to 1989 and was collected in three volumes. It is a cyberpunk detective story built on a very 1980s idea, a private eye whose replaced eye lets him interface with computers, and it reads now like a time capsule of where the genre was heading.
English editions appeared in the 2000s through Comics One and later DrMaster, so the books have been hard to find for years. A fresh edition in March is the first real chance in a long while for readers who only know Terasawa by reputation.
That reputation is mostly Cobra, his space-pirate series, which has been adapted repeatedly and remains his best-known work outside Japan. Goku also got a two-episode OVA in 1989 from Madhouse, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, which is how a lot of western fans first encountered the title. Terasawa died in September 2023 at 68.
One more schedule change
Nakama also confirmed a new date for Samurai Pizza Cats, its 200-page middle-grade comic inspired by Kyatto-Ninden Teyandee. The book moves to December 8 after previously being listed for April 7 this year.
Why it matters
Nakama is a small imprint building a catalog out of titles the bigger publishers passed on. That is the same space the bigger licensing slates announced this month are working in, and both of these pickups fit the pattern. 100 Meters is a five-volume cult manga whose film just finished its festival and theatrical run, which is exactly the window where a print edition can catch readers who watched the movie first. Goku Midnight Eye is archival rescue work, and there is not much of that happening in the current licensing market.
The open question for 100 Meters is pace. Two volumes in two months suggests Nakama wants the whole run out quickly, but nothing in the announcement commits to that. Readers who want the complete story may be waiting past 2027.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Nakama Press.
Featured image: The English edition cover of Uoto’s 100 Meters, via Anime News Network / Nakama Press.
