Kodama Tales entered the U.S. manga scene with a showy booth at New York Comic Con 2025 and an ambitious debut series: the 154-volume saga Baki the Grappler by Keisuke Itagaki (translated by David Evelyn), which it began releasing in October.

And that was just for starters. Kodama Tales, which is distributed by IPG, plans to do “a little bit of everything,” says cofounder and CFO Pierre Dubost—starting with seinen (manga for adult men) and shoujo (manga for teen girls), two categories where he sees a lot of promise. Josei (for adult women) titles are in the works for the future.

Kodama Tales is a subsidiary of Digital Catapult, itself a subsidiary of Kyodo Printing. Digital Catapult specializes in digitizing manga to be read on smartphones and computers via its Sokuyomi platform, which it sold in 2024.

“Thanks to the background with Digital Catapult and Sokuyomi, we were able to start an agency,” Dubost says. For eight years, he worked with Japanese publishers to license their titles in Brazil, France, Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey. “Our next step as a company was to do more business with the U.S., but we wanted to do it ourselves,” he explains. He cofounded Kodama Tales with CEO Kiyotaka Hirai. Because the parent company is a printer rather than a publisher, as is the case with other American manga publishers, it has contacts with more than 120 Japanese publishers.

Baki was a bold first move for Kodama Tales. While it’s a classic in Japan, where it remains ongoing with more than 100 million copies sold, the series is too long for most U.S. publishers to consider. The now-defunct American manga anthology magazine Raijin Comics published some chapters in the early 2000s, and the second arc is available digitally, but Kodama Tales is the first U.S. company to publish print volumes.

The publisher is going the deluxe route, with a complete (or “perfect”) edition that reformats the 42-volume first arc into 24 volumes, with a higher page count per volume as well as a larger trim size than most manga and deluxe covers, with French flaps and spot varnish. The series launched with a schedule of two volumes per month. Plans call for six arcs in six years, Dubost says, and he’s optimistic: several anime adaptations have been streaming on Netflix since 2018, broadening the audience beyond hardcore manga and anime fans, and another anime will launch on Netflix in 2026.

Growth mindset

Kodama Tales’ flagship announcement for 2026 is Sun-Ken Rock by Boichi (translated by Joshua Hardy), another seinen action series with a cult following, this one set in the world of organized crime. The series, which will launch in April, is 25 volumes long and has already been released digitally in English on several platforms, but this will be its first print publication. Kodama will release it as a perfect edition, with two-in-one omnibus volumes, redesigned covers, and an updated translation. Boichi is well-known in the U.S. as the artist of the Viz series Dr. Stone.

Three more series round out the plans for 2026: Smile! by Mitei Hattori (translated by Hardy), a psychological drama about a writer who becomes entangled in a cult after seeing an image of his missing wife in its literature, kicked off in January; Me and the Alien Mumu by Hiroki Miyashita (translated by Alyssa Weldon), a sci-fi comedy in which a space alien comes to Earth to study household appliances (a cat is somehow involved), launched in February; and Magica by Yuzuko Hoshimi (translated by Jan Mitsuko Cash), a two-volume, full color anthology of short stories centering on a wizard who captures people’s experiences as gems, pubs in March and May.

“When you read manga, it’s about how it feels in your hand,” Dubost says. “Production qualities are things that you can’t fully enjoy in a digital format. Having the digital format is perfectly fine, but unfortunately, in quite a few cases, it comes at the cost of the translation and lettering quality. By doing both the print and digital, you allow yourself a bit more budget to secure the best translator, to secure the best letterers, and that’s what we want to do with our perfect editions.”

While the U.S. already has a robust manga market, Dubost sees room for growth. “The type of titles and the number of titles, the breadth of genres that are going to get published in the U.S., are only going to get wider and wider,” he says. “We want to be part of that diversity—to pick up some old classics that didn’t get the publication they deserved at that time because the market wasn’t mature enough or there wasn’t enough demand, and also to bring on some new titles from authors who have a lot of potential.”

Brigid Alverson writes about graphic novel publishing regularly for PW and is the editor of the Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal.

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