Weekly Shonen Champion magazine’s issue #51 of this year announced that Osamu Tezuka’s new Black Jack one-shot manga, which is a collaboration between AI and human creators, will release on Nov 22, 2023.

The new one-shot will be titled Black Jack Kikai no Shinzo – Heartbeat Mark II (Black Jack Mechanical Heart – Heartbeat Mark II), and will comprise of 32 pages.

It was previously revealed that Tezuka Productions had collaborated with AI to jointly create the new work.

It was created following the success of project “TEZUKA2020” in 2020, where Tezuka Productions’ creators and AI collaborated to create the new work “Paidon,” in which the AI learned to imitate Tezuka’s style.

The project uses the AI created through the commissioned work by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). It involved Professor Satoshi Kurihara from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Keio University, Tezuka Productions’ Director Makoto Tezuka, among others

Black Jack is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka in the 1970s, dealing with the medical adventures of the title character, doctor Black Jack. It consists of hundreds of short, self-contained stories that are typically about 20 pages long.

Black Jack has also been animated into an OVA, two television series (directed by Satoshi Kuwahara and Tezuka’s son Makoto Tezuka) and two films.

Black Jack is Tezuka’s second most famous manga, after Astro Boy. In 1977, it won the first Kodansha Manga Award for the shonen category. It has since then became Tezuka’s second best selling manga with over 50 million copies sold only in Japan.

Source: ANN