During their industry panel at Otakon 2026 today, manga platform and publisher Omoi made a major announcement: Shinji Wada’s Delinquent Detective: Sukeban Deka will be available exclusively for digital distribution on their service. Originally running in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume magazine from 1975 to 1982, Omoi is slated to begin releasing chapters sometime this Fall, with chapters available exclusively through the Omoi Premium digital subscription. As the manga has never been made available in English until now, we had to ask a couple questions regarding its release, and Omoi’s Co-Founder & Marketing Director Evan Minto took some time over email to answer them.
TheOASG: How does it feel to be the first English publisher to license Delinquent Detective: Sukeban Deka?
Evan Minto: Pretty surreal! I remember when I first watched the Sukeban Deka OVA and how incredibly cool it was. I couldn’t believe no one else had already licensed it! I do feel a big sense of responsibility. Wada-sensei’s family and the staff at Akita Shoten have put their trust in us to properly introduce Sukeban Deka to the English-speaking world, and it’s important that this series gets the readership it deserves.
Can you share how the opportunity to acquire Sukeban Deka from Akita Shoten came about?
We had a meeting with Akita Shoten a few years ago, arranged by the licensing agent Digital Catapult. We were very interested in licensing their series since they have a lot of fantastic titles that haven’t been released in English. Our first license was Shonen Racket, which is out now, and they showed us a catalog of additional titles, but Sukeban Deka wasn’t in there. I separately flagged it as one that I was personally really interested in releasing. We wouldn’t have been able to get the license without years of building up our readership and reputation with publishers.
What’s been some of the challenges of working on this title as readers look forward to its release sometime in the Fall?
The author, Wada-sensei, has sadly passed away, so Akita doesn’t have the ability to contact the author for extra artwork or other assets. And of course since the series was released in 1975 we can’t access the kind of layered digital files we typically work with for more modern series.
Figuring out how to best present it to new readers has also been interesting; it’s a shōjo, but not the kind of romance story that many fans will expect. It’s kind of a “battle shōjo,” combining elements of a delinquent action series with a high school mystery storyline, which means there are people who will be surprised about how much they enjoy it once they give it a shot.
With thanks to Manga Mavericks, Omoi will also have Kaoru Kurimoto & Yumiko Igarashi’s The Sword of Paros this year as well — how significant is it to have these two classic shōjo manga available to be read in English on the service?
It’s something we’re really proud of! I think there’s this idea that digital platforms like ours are only for the latest series, but we want to challenge that. Lots of young people have discovered older music through streaming services, and I think a subscription manga service like Omoi can work similarly. If you already have a subscription, it’s easy to try out stories you never would have considered buying, and that means classic manga like Sukeban Deka, The Sword of Paros, Itazurana Kiss, or MARS can reach entirely new audiences.
A much more broader question, but we’ve seen a number of works being licensed in English that didn’t seem possible years ago for various reasons. Do you think the climate for what’s available to be acquired has changed dramatically in the last 2-3 years, and what should it mean for future English manga releases moving forward?
Part of it is just the industry expanding. Ever since the huge manga boom during the peak of COVID, there are a lot more people buying manga. There are also more publishers out there, including a lot more smaller publishers like us, Glacier Bay Books, Manga Mavericks Books, and Peow2. And that means more publishers willing to take big swings on titles that might be a tough sell for a bigger publisher.
But I’ve been surprised by some releases from big publishers too! I wouldn’t have thought I’d see Kingdom or Hajime no Ippo in English. I’m not entirely sure what’s changed for those publishers, but it’s really exciting to see so many of these series get picked up after years of assuming they were impossible.