#DRCL - Midnight Children #1
The Ki-oon French edition of #DRCL midnight children vol. 1 (January 2024) brought Shin'ichi Sakamoto's radical reimagining of Bram Stoker's Dracula to francophone readers for the first time, positioning it within the European manga market alongside the VIZ Media English release that had already drawn international critical attention. Rather than a faithful adaptation, the series reframes Stoker's source material as a boarding-school gothic horror with Mina Murray — here the sole female student at the elite Whitby School — as a class-conscious, physically assertive protagonist whose battles against both Dracula and Victorian patriarchy give the century-old story pointed contemporary resonance. The series' fusion of Japanese seinen aesthetics with Western gothic horror, and its willingness to interrogate gender, class, and colonial anxiety through the Dracula myth, earned it dual 2024 Eisner Award nominations and the inaugural Best New Manga prize at the American Manga Awards, signaling its crossover cultural weight.
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Sakamoto conceived the project in 2020 after completing Innocent Rouge: invited by horror manga artist Usamaru Furuya to collaborate on a doujinshi, Sakamoto read Stoker's novel for the first time and found themes — epidemic fear, women's rights, class struggle — that he felt demanded a contemporary manga treatment. That self-published doujinshi, 'Dorachu,' caught the attention of Shueisha's Grand Jump editorial team, who invited Sakamoto to develop it into a full serialization; a preview one-shot appeared in Grand Jump on December 2, 2020, with monthly serialization beginning January 20, 2021. Shueisha collected the early chapters into the first Japanese tankōbon volume in February 2022; VIZ Media licensed the series for English publication in February 2023, with translator Caleb Cook; Ki-oon published the French edition — translated by Sylvain Chollet — on January 25, 2024, timed to coincide with Sakamoto's guest appearance at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Written and illustrated entirely by Shin'ichi Sakamoto, who previously created The Climber and the Innocent duology — both Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence Award winners.
- The Ki-oon French edition (vol. 1, January 25, 2024, ISBN 979-1032718032) is 246 pages, published in the seinen collection, translated by Sylvain Chollet, and adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula.
- The series originated as a 2020 doujinshi Sakamoto made with horror mangaka Usamaru Furuya, then grew into a monthly serialization in Shueisha's Grand Jump magazine beginning January 20, 2021.
- The story's central protagonist is Wilhelmina 'Mina' Murray, reimagined as the only female student at the all-boys Whitby School, a working-class Lancashire girl skilled in Catch as Catch Can wrestling who faces both gender-based bullying and the supernatural threat of Count Dracula.
- Lucy Westenra is reimagined in the series as a character with a dual gender identity (Luke by day, Lucy by night), a significant departure from Stoker's source novel that drew both praise and debate from readers.
- The VIZ Media English edition (translated by Caleb Cook) was nominated at the 2024 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards in two categories: Best Adaptation from Another Medium and Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia.
- The series won Best New Manga at the inaugural 2024 American Manga Awards, as confirmed by Anime News Network coverage and Sakamoto's own interview statements.
- As of mid-2026, the manga is ongoing with seven Japanese tankōbon volumes published; Sakamoto guest-appeared at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in January 2024 to coincide with the Ki-oon French launch.
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