Updates on Akephalos project page

New Series: The Barbarian

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:49:17 +0300

New series! Nanbanjin (or The Barbarian) by Taiyô Matsumoto

Do I have to sell it any more than that? I figure Matsumoto’s name is enough.
This one takes place on a small Japanese island during the Muromachi period, where one day, a foreigner washes ashore. He quickly gets essentially adopted by a lonely old fisherman who lost his son to the sea (not a spoiler, that’s right on page one). Tensions between him, the island’s residents, and local samurai soon arise.
Also, the art is just beautiful.

Site functional at last

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:46:38 +0300

Ended up on neocities after all. Now, I can finally use this for something

Grappler Agito (Keisuke Itagaki)

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:54:14 +0300

Cubari page

Itagaki’s prototype for what would eventually become the Baki series. I learned Adobe Illustrator for this only to forget everything after finishing the first chapter. There’s only two total.

500 Lightyear Legend (Takeshi Obata oneshot)

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:51:41 +0300

Cubari page

This was printed in the third volume of Chikarabito Densetsu. A little scifi thing that got Obata close to winning the Tezuka award in 1985.

Make-Upper (Keisuke Itagaki)

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:48:52 +0300

Cubari page

The slowest and most inconsistent project. However, I now have help with the horribly smudged scans I ended up with and I hope to get this off the ground properly.

Chikarabito Densetsu (Masaru Miyazaki and Takeshi Obata)

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:45:38 +0300

Cubari page
My first real project ever and I decided to do it with physical scans. Overall enjoyable although it’s a bit strange a biographical manga was made so early. Was the sumo boom just that big a deal?
There’s a couple of translation flubs in this that keep me up at night that I may or may not ever bother to fix.

Kaina ~Surugajô Gozenjiai~ (Norio Nanjo and Hideki Mori)

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:41:57 +0300

Cubari page
Samurai anthology based on the novel which also inspired Shigurui. I’ve only finished one out of four volumes so far but I’ll keep at it.
There are multiple samurai-exclusive first person pronouns, somehow.

Harukanaru Ring (Keigo Nakamura)

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:37:17 +0300

Cubari page
This was experimental in that I commited to drawing the sound effects by hand. Interesting, but never again.
I’m not very knowledgeable on プロレス, but thankfully Trick (the translator) was.
Everything turned out pretty well for a project I started because I saw a few cool pages on twitter one day. It’s unfortunate that Nakamura-sensei never made anything nearly as good again.

Garouden vol 1 to 8

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:27:36 +0300

The project is well underway since I started around a year ago and now we’re a small team chipping away at the frankly unreasonable amount of redraws.

Anyway, the chapters we’ve finished so far are hosted here
I’ll talk about the project a little bit: I used scans of the italian edition for the first seven volumes, but got frustrated with the bad cropping and black and white values, so I caved and bought a japanese set to scan in myself (actually I was donated some money which went right back into the project).
Now the pages are crisp — I like to think I’ve gained some editing skills from past projects. Glorious 2240 x 3200 starting from chapter 51. Redoing the earlier parts (including volume 1 which was covered by another group) is on the table but only after the rest of the series.