Shonen Barbarian: an underrated masterpiece that deserves completion

Shōnen Barbarian is a a short lived, somewhat incomplete story by Soji Yamakawa which has two versions, one for Bokura, Kodansha’s fabled Monthly Shōnen Magazine predecessor (albeit for media savvy preteens) and the other, more famous variant for one of its creator’s short lived companies, Tiger Shobo. 

I wonder if the future will be more forgiving for this story even in Japan? It’s plausible but really unlikely since huge Japanese companies have inappropriately touched pretty much all aspects of Japanese pop culture for a long time. It’s startling when its creator is posthumously famous in France and Italy only for having wrote Noboru Kawasaki’s Kōya no Shōnen Isamu, the much better known manga completion of his own (pretty weak, I must admit) story, Kōya no Shōnen. 

Shonen Barbarian can be completed as a fan-made English Language doujinshi when I can buy all seventeen Wild issues in the future, but with a few things changed instead. It can also be partly copied in both the commonwealth and the USA, even with the late creator’s mostly dormant estate’s (otherwise strict) permission. Anyways, I do not think it’s going to become a global bestseller up until New Year’s Day 2063 for obvious reasons such as service issues.