DMP Launches Kickstarter For First English Translation Of ‘Kimagure Orange Road’

As someone who stayed away from manga for far longer than he should have, and ended up missing out on some pretty interesting stuff because of it, I'm always looking to expand my horizons by catching up on interesting classics, and over the past few years, DMP has been happy to provide. Thanks to a series of Kickstarter campaigns based around bringing classic --- but relatively unknown --- Osamu Tezuka stories into print in America, the publisher has been filling up bookshelves with titles like Alabaster and Storm Fairy. Now, though, it's expanding its crowdfunding efforts into a different direction.

Right now, DMP has got a Kickstarter campaign going to fund Izumi Matsumoto's Kimagure Orange Road, a shonen manga originally published in the mid-80s that involved a super-powered psychic love triangle. With 18 volumes originally published, DMP's set on collecting it all in English for the first time as a set of six 550-page Omnibus Editions --- and while it might seem strange, DMP is trying to get it all done in a single campaign.

If you've never heard of it, here's how DMP describes the series:

When high school student, Kyōsuke Kasuga, moves to a new school, he is suddenly mixed up into a complicated love triangle between a mercurial and enigmatic girl with a troubled past, named Madoka Ayukawa, and Hikaru Hiyama—Madoka's ditzy and energetic best friend. While Kyōsuke’s true feelings are for Madoka, his indecisive and sensitive personality keeps him from hurting Hikaru at the same time. To throw things more into the mix, Kyōsuke and his family hold a secret— they are espers (aka—people with psychic powers). Can Kyōsuke juggle the growing pains of high school life all the while keeping his family’s extra sensory powers a secret?

It’s teenage high school romance meets supernatural powers…roll that all up with the hi-jinks of a family of ESPers, and you got Kimagure Orange Road!

With the initial goal of $34,900, DMP is funding the first Omnibus, but rather than waiting for another campaign to continue the series, it's adding the other five entries in the series as stretch goals, with the idea of letting backers add them to their initial pledges once they've been unlocked.

It seems like an unusual model, but a lot of what DMP has been doing with its crowdfunding campaigns has felt experimental, and since DMP has often lumped two related projects --- like Storm Fairy and Unico --- into a single campaign, trying it out this way makes a certain kind of sense.

Since being launched late last week, the campaign has already raised almost all of its initial goal, offering backers digital copies of Kimagure Orange Road vol. 1 for $15, and print editions for $20. With 36 days to go, it seems pretty likely that we'll get to at least the second volume. Head over to Kickstarter to check it out!