Sherlock Holmes has had many incarnations since he was first brought to life by the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887. This summer, that most British of detectives, who has appeared as everything from a vampire hunter to a crime-fighting teenager, is being immortalised in Japanese manga.
Out in June, Sherlock: A Study in Pink adapts the BBC series, which started in 2010, transforming Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Dr John Watson into classic manga images. Publisher Titan Comics said the release would be the first time the manga series, illustrated by manga illustrator Jay, would be printed in English. It launched in Japan four years ago, and according to io9 its popularity has meant there have been a plethora of fan translations since. “It’s really interesting seeing such a British thing being reinterpreted in Japanese manga,” said Titan Comics editor Andrew James, who acquired the manga series for the publisher. “It’s still dynamic and full of action, but compared to American comics, there’s often a quietness and reflectiveness about manga.”
Titan is offering extended page counts, as well as new art and covers by artists including Alice X Zhang, in its manga series, the first issue of which opens with Holmes and Watson’s first meeting and ends with the pair moving in together.
The pair’s relationship, James said, is “not made any more explicit than it is on the television, but it’s certainly something the television has hinted at ... so [the manga] is not a thing with love hearts appearing, but it’s definitely something in which the subtext is just as strong”.
Danie Ware, from retailer Forbidden Planet, said the manga series was “pitched just right”, and an “interesting crossover”.
“It’s a very new thing, putting something which is very British into the manga format. It’s very unusual,” she said. “But ever since Benedict appeared on the television, Sherlock has been on the up and up. [And] there’s a huge following for manga amongst young women of around 21, and I think the same group follows Benedict, so there is a crossover.”
Titan is also the publisher of the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series, in which the detective variously deals with alien attacks and vampires, as well as James Lovegrove’s forthcoming Cthulhu Casebooks series, in which he takes on occult forces. In Mycroft Holmes, by the basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the life of his older brother is imagined.
“As a core starting place, Holmes is the detective - the first one, the one everyone references,” said Titan Books editor Miranda Jewess. “It’s nice to have that point of familiarity, then you can have writers from any genre playing with it ... We’ve had Holmes fighting everything - even Frankenstein’s monster.”
According to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, hundreds of Holmes-related titles were published in 2015. The most popular was Anthony Horowitz’s authorised sequel, The House of Silk, followed by a miniature edition of Conan Doyle’s Essential Mysteries. Other popular titles included Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes books, Tim Dedopulos’s Holmes puzzles, and psychologist Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.
Jewess speculated that Conan Doyle himself probably wouldn’t have approved of the industry his creation has spawned.
“Luckily, he’s out of copyright, because I don’t think he’d like it,” she said. “He tried to kill Holmes off once, and I’d think he’d want him to die again. But on the other hand, perhaps the fact that he has become more than a character, that he’s an icon, might help ease his mind.”
— Guardian News & Media Ltd.
