Some eagle eyed Amazon browsers caught wind of this over the weekend and the official Vertical Twitter account confirmed it as well; the publisher will be releasing Knights of Sidonia from Tsutomu Nihei come February 5th, 2013. Nihei has a solid list of works in Japan, best known for Blame! and BioMega, but he’s also a bit known in the US comics circle for his five issue run of Wolverine: Snikt!. This series began running in 2009 in the Kodansha seinen magazine Afternoon and has had five volumes released so far and is still ongoing.
The book is set for $12.95 price point when its released.
Series Plot (via Wikipedia): The story follows humans as they struggle to survive against the threat of the shape shifting gigantic alien monsters called Gauna. The manga begins a thousand years after humans flee from Earth, which was supposedly destroyed by the Gauna, aboard massive spaceships created from the remains of the planet. The Gauna follow the emigration ships into space, forcing the humans to create large mechanized weapons called Guardians to protect themselves. Most people in the surviving human population is screened and drafted as Guardian pilots since young age if they are shown to be capable of piloting the mecha. The story focuses on one of such ships named Sidonia which developed its own human culture closely based on that of Japan and where human cloning, asexual reproduction and human engineering such as controlled hybrid human/animal mutations and human photosynthesis are commonplace.
The main character is Tanikaze Nagate, who lived in the underground layer of Sidonia since birth. Never having met anyone, he trains himself in an old Guardian pilot simulator every day, eventually mastering it. Later he ventures out and after being tested in a new simulator he is selected as a Guardian pilot, in hopes of defending Sidonia from the Gauna’s attack using his incredible combat skills.
[Source: Conner, Kuriousity via ANN]
