Gantz Creator Hiroya Oku Announces Retirement After Current Manga

Hiroya Oku, the veteran manga creator best known for Gantz and Inuyashiki, has announced that he will retire from professional manga creation after completing his current series, Kanrekihime (The Sweet Sixty Princess).

A Definitive Decision

Oku made the announcement in an interview with Courrier Japon published on August 11, 2026. His statement left little room for ambiguity.

"No, this is it. I've made up my mind. To be honest, I just don't have the energy to keep drawing anymore," Oku said in the interview.

The creator elaborated that while his creative desire to tell stories has not faded, the physical and mental demands of developing narratives and maintaining the relentless production pace of serialized manga have become unsustainable. For an artist who has been producing manga professionally for decades, the toll of the industry's grueling schedule has finally caught up.

Kanrekihime - A Final Work as End-of-Life Preparation

Oku's farewell series, Kanrekihime, launched in Shogakukan's Big Comic Superior magazine in December 2025. The first collected volume was published on May 29, 2026. The title, which translates roughly to "The Sweet Sixty Princess," features elderly characters that Oku has described as reflections of himself and his production team.

Perhaps most tellingly, Oku has framed the series as his shūkatsu - a Japanese concept meaning end-of-life preparation or the process of putting one's affairs in order. The characterization suggests the creator views Kanrekihime not merely as his final professional project but as a deeply personal capstone to his artistic legacy.

A Career Defined by Dark, Ambitious Storytelling

Oku's impact on the manga and anime landscape spans more than two decades of boundary-pushing science fiction and action storytelling. His most iconic work, Gantz, ran from 2000 to 2013 and became a multimedia franchise that extended far beyond the printed page. The series was adapted into an anime television series, a CG animated film, two live-action films, multiple spinoff manga, and at various points attracted Hollywood adaptation interest.

Gantz's premise - ordinary people forced into deadly alien-hunting games after death - became one of the defining dark sci-fi concepts in manga of the 2000s, earning both critical attention and commercial success.

Following Gantz, Oku created Inuyashiki, which concluded in September 2017 and was similarly adapted into both an anime series and a live-action film. The story of an elderly man who gains robotic superpowers showcased Oku's recurring interest in mortality, aging, and the human body pushed to its limits.

His subsequent series GIGANT ran in Big Comic Superior from 2017 to 2021, further cementing his long relationship with Shogakukan's seinen magazine lineup.

The Weight of Serialization

Oku's retirement adds to a broader conversation within the manga industry about the physical and creative toll that long-term serialization takes on creators. The demands of weekly or biweekly chapter production, combined with the expectation of maintaining artistic quality over years or decades, have driven numerous prominent manga artists to speak publicly about exhaustion and health struggles.

With Kanrekihime still ongoing in Big Comic Superior, readers can continue following Oku's work as it progresses toward its conclusion. No specific end date for the series has been announced. When the final chapter does arrive, it will mark the close of a career that produced some of seinen manga's most memorable and provocative stories.