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Gundam's Yoshikazu Yasuhiko Launches Short-Term Manga Series on March 6

This year's 13th issue of Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump magazine revealed on Thursday that Yoshikazu Yasuhiko will launch a new manga titled Giniro no Michi -Handa-yama Ibun- (Silver Road -Strange Stories of the Handa Silver Mine-) in the magazine's next issue on March 6. The manga will be a short-term series that will run every two weeks. The manga is Yasuhiko's first series in the magazine.

The manga tells the story and unknown side of Godai Tomoatsu, Japan's leading entrepreneur of the early Meiji period, and how he overcomes friction, misunderstandings, and other challenges to pave the way to the recovery of the Handa Silver Mine, one of Japan's three major mines in the Edo period.

Yasuhiko began working as a manga creator with his manga Arion, which first serialized in 1979, and The Venus Wars, which first serialized in 1986. In 2001, Yasuhiko launched his Gundam: The Origin manga, a retelling of the original 1979 series' story. Yasuhiko launched his "final new series" Inui to Tatsumi: Siberia Shuppei Hishi- (Inui and Tatsumi: Secret History of the Siberian Intervention) in Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon magazine in September 2020. The manga ended in May 2024.

Yasuhiko began his career as an animator at Mushi Productions in 1967. He designed the characters on the studio's Nozomi in the Sun 1971 series, which was his first collaboration with the show's storyboard artist and future Mobile Suit Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino. The pair also worked together on Space Battleship Yamato's storyboards and Brave Raideen, before Tomino launched the Mobile Suit Gundam series in 1979 with character designs by Yasuhiko.

Since then, Yasuhiko worked on character designs for other installments in the Gundam franchise, including Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Mobile Suit Gundam F91. He was the director and character designer of the Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin anime and most recently, the Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island movie, which premiered in June 2022.

Yasuhiko received an award in the Film Lifetime Achievement Category of the Japanese government's Agency of Cultural Affairs' Film Awards in 2022.

Source: Weekly Young Jump issue 13