Kodansha’s magazine Afternoon, in its July issue, announced that studio LIDEN FILMS will adapt the manga Historie by Hitoshi Iwaaki into a TV anime series, scheduled to premiere in January 2027.
Lead Voice Actor and Main Character
Nobunaga Shimazaki has been cast to voice Eumenes, the protagonist of the story. Many anime fans will recognize Shimazaki as the lead voice actor of Parasyte -the maxim-, which was also adapted from an Iwaaki manga.
Synopsis
Historie is an epic historical drama set in antiquity, following the life of Eumenes — a young man of exceptional wit and resourcefulness with an extraordinary destiny ahead of him. His path will lead him to become a great general and personal secretary to Alexander the Great, but before that day comes, he must navigate a string of perilous encounters.
Manga Background
Iwaaki began serializing Historie in Kodansha’s Afternoon magazine in October 2004, and the series remains ongoing to this day. Volume 12 was released on June 21, 2024, and cumulative print copies have surpassed 4.7 million.
The work has won numerous prestigious awards, including:
- Media Arts Festival Award in the manga category from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, 2010
- 16th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, 2012
- Best General Manga at the 49th Kodansha Manga Awards, 2025
The Creator’s Connection to This Work
In an interview at the anime announcement, Iwaaki revealed that he first conceived the story of Historie over 40 years ago and began sketching it out in a small personal studio about 20 years back. It is a project he committed to completing before debuting as a professional manga artist — and has now finally brought to life.
Iwaaki’s Other Works
For fans who know Iwaaki from his earlier work, his manga Parasyte (Kiseiju) was serialized between 1990 and 1995 and was later adapted into both an anime series and two live-action films released in 2014–2015.
Source: ann_jp

