A highly requested title from Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki, the in-demand manga Billy Bat is a historical conspiracy-thriller meta-manga spanning multiple millennia following a Japanese American comic artist’s search for the truth regarding the origins of his character “Billy Bat.”

This is the first thrilling volume in the sci-fi mystery by Naoki Urusawa and Takashi Nagasaki, beautifully packaged and available for the first time in English.

It’s 1949 Los Angeles, and 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.