A group of Japanese animation and manga artists is turning ghost stories into manga for the first time, launching a new anime series called Ghost Stories.
The manga, which is titled Ghost Stories, will launch on April 1.
The anime, titled Ghost Adventures, will debut on April 30.
Ghost Stories has already been licensed to various anime companies and publishers, including FUNimation and TBS.
“The ghost stories manga genre is well known in Japan, so we thought we would create a new one, which can appeal to a wider audience,” said Yoshihiro Tada, the head of the Ghost Stories anime series.
“We also want to bring the art to life, so this is an opportunity to do so by turning the ghost story into a manga.”
The Ghost Stories manga series is an adaptation of a novel by Tetsuo Ichinose, which became a bestseller in Japan and has been translated into English and several other languages.
The novel has been adapted into a live-action movie, the Ghost Adventures anime, which will premiere in March.
“Ghost Stories is a story that has always been in my heart, but I have never thought it could become a manga series,” Ichinous said.
“It’s a story with a lot of spirit, a story of a world that never existed.”
Ichinose was a student of the late Japanese artist Makoto Kano and a student in Tokyo at the time of the disaster.
His ghost stories novels include “The Ghosts Who Walk the Earth,” “The World Is a Haunted Place” and “The Ghost That Told Me That I Was Missing.”
Ichinouse was a graduate student at Kyoto University in 1986 and had previously made the transition to film.
He was the subject of an animated documentary called Ghost Adventures.
Ichinous died in 2017.