So, it was recently brought to my attention that Yukiru Sugisaki would start reviving her long running fantasy romance manga series D.N. Angel this year. This is the first mention of anything new from the series since the author went on hiatus 8 YEARS AGO! Yes, you read that right, it has been 8 years since the release of volume 15 back in 2011 and what’s worse, this isn’t even the first time the series has been on hiatus and I’m pretty damn sure it won’t be the last… so, forgive me if I’m not shouting from the rooftops at the announcement that the series is finally back from the dead.
https://twitter.com/MangaMogura/status/1142897565324759040
Some context…
D.N. Angel follows Daisuke Niwa a 13 year old boy who is descended from a long line of phantom thieves. Daisuke is kinda shy and pretty average, despite having been put through a rigorous training regimen by his mother and grandfather. Other than that life is pretty normal! On his 14th birthday he finally plucks up the courage to confess to the girl of his dreams, Risa Harada, but homegirl turns him down hard! Full of teen angst and fueld by his broken heart, Daisuke goes home to mope a bit, thats when he gets hit with magical puberty. His body transforms into that of the handsome phantom thief Dark Mousy (my first anime crush). Daisuke freaks the fuck out, thankfully his mom is around to explain that the transformation is completely normal, having affected all of the Niwa men for generations. The change she explains is triggered by the host’s romantic feelings of love, and will keep happening until Daisuke finds someone who can love him and Dark. The rest of the story focuses on Daisuke’s attempts to balance his normal life with that of his secret phantom thief alter ego. To make matters worse, Dark has his own consciousness within Daisuke which often gets him into trouble as they both struggle to coexist. Then Daisuke goes and falls in love with Risa’s twin sister, Riku who absolutely hates Dark after he stole her first kiss… yeah, and I thought I had problems…
D.N. Angel was originally released in 1997 with new chapters appearing in Monthly Azuka until 2005, when Sugisaki put the series on an extended hiatus to work on other projects (she has a habit of stopping series midway to start up new ones). There was a 3 year gap with no news about the series and then out of the blue, Sugisaki announced that she would be picking the series back up again in 2008 and she was good to her word. New chapters were coming out pretty regularly until 2011, when the series was once again put on hiatus, only this time it was supposed to be a short 6 month break... a six month break that lasted 8 motherfucking years?! Do I sound mad? Good, cus I was absolutely livid! The cherry on top of this marvelous cluster fuck of a cake is that the series went on hiatus at a critical point in the series a moment that the series had been building up to for YEARS: The moment when Riku discovers that Daisuke is Dark…
BRUH!! THIS WAS HUGE! LIKE THE BIGGEST FUCKING EVENT IN THE SERIES! Everything and I mean everything was leading up to this point and to be left hanging for 8 years… there are no words for how frustrating that still is! I get it, authors have lives outside of their work. They have families, friends, emergencies… stuff. But, to have no word on the status of the series for 8 years absolutely broke my heart!
The D.N. Angel anime was the first anime I was ever really invested in, so much so that I begged my mom to buy me the manga so I could continue the story (since the anime ending leaves much to be desired). At the time, Tokyopop was releasing them pretty regularly up until 2009 when they went under dropping the series at volume 13. Viz has since picked up the digital license for the series, but there hasn’t been a new English release out of them, just re-releases of the original 13 volume Tokyopop run…
I love D.N. Angel, it was one of the series that sparked my love anime and Japanese culture. A part of me is over the moon about it’s return, but… I’ve been burned in the past, so I’m hesitant to jump back on the D.N. Angel hype train again, because every time I fall back into Yukiru Sugisaki’s warm embrace she pulls the rug up from under my feet and the series is put back in limbo once again. *sigh* D.N. Angel is the reason I don’t like starting ongoing series, I refuse to put myself in a situation where a series plays tug of war with my heart again. For me D.N. Angel is like that ex boyfriend you know is no good, but you keep running back to time and time again. You know you’re gonna get burned, but you can’t quite shake those lingering feelings…
Have you guys ever had a series like this? You love it, but constant hiatuses and breaks make it impossible to finish… I know there’s D Grayman and Hunter x Hunter… and the worst part is, there hasn’t been a single announcement about continuing the series in English…
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I remember writing about this a while ago. But NANA and X (X/1999) both immediately come to mind.
I have D.N.Angel, but I fell off when I knew the series went into hiatus. I figured I’d pick it back up when the series restarted and… well, it’s buried in my shelves somewhere with me only having a hazy memory of what happened in the story.
ah… yes… NANA… -_-
I have fond memories of the series, but this hiatus has been hard. Especially given where the story left things…
Someone warned me about X so I never picked it up and CLAMP burned me with Legal Drug… so I’m hesitant to start their ongoing series.
Tonari no Kashiwagi-san! Took nearly three years to have the last seven chapters be scanlated. Personally spent six years reading it until that point. There are 84 total chapters…
OH WOW. I’m glad this is going to be continued though!
Not sure if this series by Sugisaki comes to mind, but I felt a certain type of way when she decided to just outright drop Candidate for Goddess, another series of hers, after only 5 volumes, and then the anime left a sour taste in my mouth with it not wrapping up acceptably. That’s why when I started reading DNAngel, I couldn’t continue with it knowing it would suffer a similar fate.