Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Alan Moore, Billy Bat, Comics, manga, Naoki Urusawa, Thomas Pynchon, warners, Watchmen

Billy Bat: Urusawa's Postmodern Comics Masterpiece Coming Next June

Naoki Urusawa is the closest Japan has to an Alan Moore, and his most ambitious manga epic, Billy Bat, is finally getting an English edition.

At long last, Billy Bat, one of the unseen masterpieces by one of the greatest manga creators, is getting an official English edition. Manga isn't all Shonen Beat and lunkheaded but earnest young guys who want to fight and come to triumph with the power of friendship, Naoki Urusawa is the closest the manga world has to an Alan Moore, his most ambitious works share a deconstructionist look at culture and its effects on the soul of a society, the next step after his classic epics Monster and Twentieth Century Boys.

Billy Bat begins in 1949 Los Angeles, where Kevin Yamagata, a Japanese American comic book author, is drawing his bestselling character, Billy Bat: a quick-witted detective who is, unsurprisingly, a cartoon bat. Everything is going well for Kevin until he discovers an unfortunate truth: He may have unintentionally plagiarized his beloved character from a drawing he once saw in Japan. Devastated by the news, Kevin returns to war-torn Japan to find the drawing's original artist . . . but the character's origins turn out to be far older and more perplexing than he had ever imagined.

An Alternate Universe Look at the American Comics Industry

From there, Billy Bat becomes weirder and more unpredictable. At first it looks like Urusawa and his co-writer Takashi Nagasaki are exploring the wild cowboy days of the American comics industry of the 1940s where figures like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had their creation Superman stolen from the by their corporate publisher, with the character "Billy Bat" an combination of Batman, The Spirit and Mickey Mouse, and there are references or homages to other comics creators of the time like Batman creator Bob Kane and Walt Disney. Billy Bat, the cute, balderised version is stolen from Kevin Yamagata and turned into a Mickey Mouse-like phenomenon, launching a billion-dollar empire complete with merchandising and amusement parts clearly inspired by Disney (a negative portrayal of corporate theft and greed that fed rumours of why the manga series hasn't been picked up for Western publication for so long).

What makes Billy Bat strange, unpredictable, and ambitious is a cosmic, even supernatural layer that may or may not be manipulating all the characters. Billy Bat himself appears as a hallucination to several characters, influencing them and possibly the course of history from the Cold War all the way to the 21st Century and beyond, as more people are drawn into a weird cosmic conspiracy with the future of humanity ultimately at stake. As with many manga, it's about war and whether the human race will save or destroy itself. Billy Bat becomes an avatar for that question, and there's a unique take on time travel in the story that hadn't been done anywhere before. There's a gonzo Pynchonesque take on history and how pop culture has reflected and even shaped the world. That's the common thread that Urusawa and Alan Moore share in their stories, along with the Thomas Pynchon influence of merging History with Pop Culture to examine the leylines of political systems. It's also a look at how a Japanese comics creator might view American comics and culture.

Billy Bat Vol. 1 (the first of 20) is published on June 2nd, 2026.

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