Exclusive to Kodansha’s Kiss magazine, BEASTARS author Paru Itagaki will be releasing her autobiographical manga, Paruno Graffiti, beginning in the magazine’s September 25th issue, and will run monthly. The manga is stated by Kiss to be a short dramedy focusing on Itagaki, her two older sisters, and her parents.
Meanwhile, Itagaki’s acclaimed manga BEASTARS continues its great success with the release of its fourteenth volume in Japan, its first volume making its way to the West thanks to Viz Media, and an anime adaptation in production, which is slated for release in October and will exclusively stream on Netflix. There’s no word yet if the series will be available to stream for Western audiences alongside the Japanese series, or if we’ll be waiting for an English dub before Western release.
Though, on the surface, BEASTARS may seem like Zootopia on steroids, it actually manages to tell an adult, complex, nuanced version of a tale about anthropomorphic animals attempting to live together in harmony. A harmony — as our protagonist Legosi (grey wolf) learns — that isn’t without caveats, concessions, or cruelty, when herbivorous student Tem (alpaca) is murdered at his elite high school. Throw in complicated emotions for dwarf rabbit Haru, and Legosi’s placid views of himself and the world around him are going to begin to shift drastically.
If Itagaki’s storytelling prowess is anything like we’re currently seeing with BEASTARS, there’s no doubt Paruno Graffiti will be both equal parts heartstring-pulling and sweetly funny. BEASTARS has won several awards since its release in 2016, most notably the 11th Manga Taisho award and New Face Award during the 21st Japan Media Arts Festival in 2018. No doubt with an English release manga and an anime on the way, there are more awards to come. I’m personally looking forward to seeing more of Itagaki’s work outside of shonen, and can’t wait to see if Paruno Graffiti gets much the same treatment as BEASTARS in the future.
Source: Anime News Network
