#DRCL - Midnight Children #4

History

The genesis of #DRCL midnight children traces back to 2020, when Shin'ichi Sakamoto — fresh from completing his long-running seinen series Innocent — was invited by horror-specialist manga artist Usamaru Furuya to collaborate on a doujinshi (self-published fanzine). That deep dive into Bram Stoker's novel revealed to Sakamoto themes he felt were urgently contemporary: fear of epidemic, the suppression of women within patriarchal institutions, and colonial anxiety about the foreign 'other.' The resulting series launched in Shueisha's Grand Jump magazine with a preview chapter on December 2, 2020, beginning full serialization January 20, 2021. The Ki-oon French edition of Volume 4, translated by Sylvain Chollet, was published February 6, 2025, as part of Ki-oon's ongoing French-language rollout of the series, which began in early 2024. Sakamoto has spoken publicly about the extreme physical research behind the artwork — sourcing authentic late 19th-century English antique dresses and drawing from actual period references — to achieve the 'warmth and shimmer of 19th-century handwork' he considers essential to the series' visual identity.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Written and illustrated entirely by Shin'ichi Sakamoto (#DRCL is both his script and art); the French Ki-oon edition (Vol. 4) was translated by Sylvain Chollet and published February 6, 2025.
• Volume 4 is the narrative pivot of the series: it abandons the Whitby School present-tense storyline mid-cliffhanger and flashes back to Jonathan Harker's journey through Eastern Europe to Castle Dracula — the opening section of Stoker's novel, which Sakamoto had strategically withheld until this point.
• Jonathan Harker is reimagined in this volume as a young wheelchair-using boy (rather than the adult solicitor of the novel), sent to the Count by Whitby School's Headmaster — a recontextualization that dramatically alters the power dynamics of the castle encounter.
• Volume 4 introduces Count Dracula in multiple simultaneous visual forms: one referencing Vlad Țepeș (the historical Impaler), and one as a gender-ambiguous, androgynous figure with cat ears (nekomimi) — Dracula's plurality of identity is a recurring theme Sakamoto deepens here.
• Structurally, this volume contains approximately 14 chapters (roughly double prior volumes), reflecting a mid-series change in Grand Jump's publication format from bi-weekly to weekly installments at roughly half the chapter length each.
• The series had, by the time of this volume's release, received 2024 Eisner Award nominations in Best Adaptation from Another Medium and Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia, and won Best New Manga at the inaugural 2024 American Manga Awards.
• The Ki-oon French edition is published in paperback (seinen collection) under an 'ado/adulte' rating; the parallel VIZ Media English hardcover edition of the same volume (ISBN 9781974752034, 216 pages) was published March 25, 2025.
• Sakamoto has described his artistic method for #DRCL as deliberately analog in texture, referencing actual period antique garments and physical props — for this volume, this extends to the visual design of Transylvania and Castle Dracula's architecture, rendered with what reviewers have compared to Escher-like impossible geometry and Möbius strip visual motifs.