Posted in: Comics, Manga, Yen Press | Tagged: horror, manga, mokumokuren, The Summer Hikaru Died, Yen Press

The Summer Hikaru Died: Sought-after Horror Manga Out in July

The Summer Hikaru Died, Vol. One, the eagerly-anticipated horror manga by artist Mokumokuren, will be available in English at last from Yen Press in print and digital July 2023.

Published Sun, 15 Jan 2023 11:32:12 -0600

by Adi Tantimedh

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Yen Press announced The Summer Hikaru Died, Vol. One, a rising star in the world of horror manga by artist Mokumokuren, will be available in English at last in print and digital in July 2023.

The Summer Hikaru Died

By Mokumokuren

Two boys lived in a village: Yoshiki and Hikaru. The two did everything together…until the day Hikaru was encompassed by a mysterious light. That was when everything changed—Hikaru most of all. Yoshiki still wishes from the bottom of his heart to always stay by his side…but is there even a Hikaru left to be with?

In a short span of time, The Summer Hikaru Died has captured the attention and acclaim of the manga world due to its beautiful yet grotesque art style and its depiction of a complicated love between a boy and his deceased friend whose body now houses a mysterious entity. Due to its critical acclaim in Japan and the immense popularity of horror manga in the West, The Summer Hikaru Died has become one of the most highly anticipated and frequently requested series of the past year.

The Summer Hikaru Died is a meditation on death, loss, and grief. It draws on folkloric tales of demonic and spirit possession, exacerbated by the story being set in a rural village where superstition and myth still prevail. None of this is explicit, of course, just as the background the gives the story context. What if you can't let go of your dead best friend? What if an entity wants to be you to be its friend and pretends to be your dead best friend and won't let you go enough to threaten to kill you? How long can you pretend things are back to normal when nothing about this is normal? What if people start dying? What really is a friendship? What is a human? These are the questions the graphic novel explores as Horror.

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