Highlights
- Western comics risk sacrificing beloved runs and characters for less entertaining stories, while mangaka have more creative freedom.
- Mangaka often go on hiatus due to health concerns, leaving seinen manga incomplete and uncertain of continuation.
- Several iconic manga series, such as Me and the Devil Blues and Vagabond, have gone on extended hiatuses and may never be completed.
The grass can often look greener on the other side. Western comics run the risk of junking favored runs by beloved authors in favor of less entertaining stories, or editorial mandates that can take popular characters in bad directions. By contrast, manga artists, or mangaka, seem to have more creative freedom, where they get to control what they create with less drastic interventions.
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However, Western comic staff get to sleep at night. Mangaka schedules are notoriously hard going, with many often having to go on hiatus to recover their health. Sometimes these hiatuses are brief, and sometimes they’re not. No one likes to say ‘never’, and there’s a slim chance some series may come back into publication. But the odds are these seinen manga will likely remain incomplete.
7 Me and the Devil Blues
MyAnimeList Score: 8.08/10
- Written & Illustrated by Akira Hiramoto.
- Historical psychological horror.
- 2003-2008, then 2015-2016.
Traveling musician Robert Johnson’s run was brief yet left an indelible impact that’s still felt today. His style of blues would essentially create rock music, inspiring Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones, among others. However, he didn’t live to see his success, dying in mysterious circumstances at the age of 27. It led to the urban legend that he sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads for his talent, and he came to collect.
Inspired by the legend, Akira Hiramoto created Me and the Devil Blues, named after one of Johnson’s most famous songs. It has some biographical notes, but otherwise tells the urban legend verbatim as a psychological horror story. It went on hiatus back in 2008, then briefly came back in 2015 before going back on the shelf in 2016. There’s still a chance Hiramoto will go back to it, but as of this writing, that time hasn’t come yet.
6 Bastard!!
MyAnimeList Score: 7.22/10
- Written & Illustrated by Kazushi Hagiwara.
- Action adventure fantasy.
- 1988-2010.
Just as Johnson’s blues led to rock, rock led to metal, and Kazushi Hagiwara loves metal. He also loves Dungeons & Dragons, so he combined both of his interests to form Bastard!! Where the evil wizard Dark Schneider is revived in the body of a teenager, Lucien Renlan, and forced by former enemies to protect the Kingdom of Metallicana and prevent the resurrection of the demon Anthrasax.
Hagiwara arguably outdoes Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s Hirohiko Araki in filling his work with musical references. It even got a cult classic OVA series, and a Netflix series that's had better luck getting new content than its source material. The manga has gone on frequent hiatuses since 1989, with the 2010s and (thus far) 2020s being its driest eras with minimal content. If it does get completed, it won’t be anytime soon.
5 Vagabond
MyAnimeList Score: 9.24/10
- Written & Illustrated by Takehiko Inoue, based on a novel by Eiji Yoshikawa.
- Historical samurai epic.
- 1998-2010, 2012-2014, 2015.
After having created Japan’s most famous basketball manga in Slam Dunk, and one of its more underrated ones in REAL, Takehiko Inoue turned his attention to history. In 1998, he began work on Vagabond, a strip about the famous samurai Musashi Miyamoto from his survival at the Battle of Sekigahara onwards. It became one of the best-selling manga series of all time and won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2002.
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Inoue had hoped to end the series by 2010-2011. Instead, he put it on hiatus due to health concerns and lacking enthusiasm. The strip did reappear from 2012 to 2014, and got an extra chapter in 2015. But it's since gone quiet since that 2015 chapter, with this being its longest hiatus yet. Considering those health concerns, these occasional updates may be for the best.
4 PTSD Radio
MyAnimeList Score: 6.88/10
- Written & Illustrated by Masaaki Nakayama.
- Horror anthology.
- 2010-2018.
Masaaki Nakayama isn’t as famous (or infamous) as fellow horror mangaka Junji Ito, though his work is just as disturbing if not more so. Particularly with his anthology series PTSD Radio, where its unfortunate leads get preyed on by the ancient spirit Ogushi. Unlike other short story compilations, the stories all take place in the same settings, linked by human hair.
Then it went on an ‘unofficial hiatus’ in 2018. It was around then that Nakayama was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease that caused drastic body temperature drops and bleeding. Curiously, it resembled some events from the strip itself. Luckily, Nakayama got treatment, but the condition limited his ability to work. Chances are that PTSD Radio’s hiatus, ‘unofficial’ as it is, will remain permanent.
3 Croisée in a Foreign Labyrinth
MyAnimeList Score: 7.41/10
- Written & Illustrated by Hinata Takeda.
- Historical iyashikei manga.
- 2006-2011.
The late 20th century saw Japanese media rise in popularity, but they were also a phenomenon back in the late 19th century. The country’s modernization led to more Japanese art, goods, and resources getting traded worldwide, with France in particular falling in love with 'Japonisme'. Croisée in a Foreign Labyrinth would’ve shown this from the perspective of Yune, a Japanese girl who gets the chance to live in Paris and see what 19thC France has to offer.
The strip ran in Dragon Age Pure and Monthly Dragon Age magazine from 2006 to 2011, where it suddenly went on hiatus without a formal announcement. It just stopped appearing in the magazine’s pages at the end of the year. This turned out to be due to the mangaka, Hinata Takeda, falling ill from a condition which sadly got worse until her passing in 2017. Without her, Croisée is unlikely to make a comeback.
2 Barefoot Gen
MyAnimeList Score: 8.35/10
- Written & Illustrated by Keiji Nakazawa.
- Historical semi-biography.
- 1973-1974.
A mangaka's death isn’t necessarily the end of their work. Holyland’s Kōji Mori did a lot of soul-searching before agreeing to complete Berserk, the work of his late friend Kentarō Miura. Chibi Maruko-chan also continued for 4 more years after the real ‘Maruko’ Momoko Sakura's death in 2018, with her assistant Botan Kohagi in charge. But other works are so closely tied to their creators that no one else could really take their reins.
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Barefoot Gen, the legendary manga about the survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, was partly based on creator Keiji Nakazawa’s own experiences following the attack. The strip technically ended with Gen heading to Tokyo, but Nakazawa did have plans to produce a sequel series. They only got canceled when his ailing health led him to announce his retirement. He’d pass away in 2012, leaving Gen’s story as complete as it can be.
1 Phoenix
MyAnimeList Score: 8.61/10
- Written & Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka.
- Supernatural fantasy/sci-fi drama.
- 1954-1988.
Osamu Tezuka created many iconic manga series, like Astro Boy, Black Jack, and Jungle Emperor (aka Kimba the White Lion). Yet the strip he considered his ‘life’s work’ was a little more obscure. Phoenix consisted of several, separate story arcs set across different eras in time and space. But they’d all share the themes of immortality, with the Phoenix itself often making an appearance.
Tezuka started working on the strip in 1954, then would continually work on it across its different publications. Even as he lay ill with cancer, he kept working on the strip until his death in 1989. But with Tezuka gone, Phoenix came to an abrupt end rather than a full-on conclusion. Its last publication brought things full circle by putting Tezuka's concept art and early drafts of the strip from the 1950s together in one volume.