A long-awaited English debut from Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki, Billy Bat Volume 1 launches a sweeping conspiracy thriller that moves across decades and continents, pulling readers into a mystery that refuses to stay contained on the page!
Praised with two starred reviews, this series arrives as one of the most anticipated manga releases of the year.
The story begins in 1949 Los Angeles. Kevin Yamagata, a Japanese American cartoonist, has built his career on Billy Bat, a sharp, wisecracking detective beloved by readers. But everything shifts when Kevin realizes he may have unknowingly copied the character from an image he once saw in Japan.
Determined to find the truth, Kevin returns to a devastated, postwar Japan. What he uncovers goes far beyond questions of inspiration or theft. The image of the bat is ancient, surfacing again and again across history, tied to moments of upheaval, power, and violence.
As Kevin follows the trail, he is drawn into a far-reaching mystery that blurs fiction and reality, where a single drawing may hold the key to forces shaping human history.
Praise
The story, full of intrigue, conspiracy, and mysticism, and set against the backdrop of the nascent comics industry in the U.S. and Japan and the early days of the Cold War, plays to all of Urasawa’s strengths as a storyteller who can meaningfully comment on history while infusing it with thrilling high concepts and genre elements.
—Booklist (Starred Review), Harry Kassen
