Fist of the Blue Sky | |
Cover of volume 22, featuring most of the main characters.
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蒼天の拳 (Sōten no Ken) |
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Genre | Historical fiction, Martial arts |
Manga | |
Written by | Tetsuo Hara, Buronson |
Illustrated by | Tetsuo Hara |
Published by | Shinchosha |
English publisher | |
Demographic | Seinen |
Magazine | Weekly Comic Bunch |
English magazine | |
Original run | May 2001 – August 2010 |
Volumes | 22 |
Anime television series | |
Directed by | Yoshihiro Yamaguchi |
Written by | Yasuhiro Imagawa |
Studio | Souten Studio, Studio APPP |
Original network | TV Asahi |
Original run | October 4, 2006 – March 14, 2007 |
Episodes | 26 |
Fist of the Blue Sky (Japanese: 蒼天の拳 Hepburn: Sōten no Ken?) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Tetsuo Hara, with plot supervision by Buronson. It was serialized in Weekly Comic Bunch from 2001 to 2010, with the chapters collected into 22 tankōbon volumes by Shinchosha. It is a prequel to the popular 1980s manga Fist of the North Star, which Hara originally illustrated with Buronson writing. Set primarily in Shanghai during the 1930s, the series centers on the 62nd successor of the Hokuto Shinken martial arts style, Kenshiro Kasumi, the namesake and predecessor of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star. The manga was adapted into a 26-episode anime series that aired on TV Asahi from 2006 to 2007.
The main protagonist of this story is Kasumi Kenshiro, better known as "Yan Wang" or "The King of Hell" (derived from the myth Yan Luo Wang). Kasumi is a laid back and chain-smoking Tokyo professor who is secretly the successor of the deadly Chinese assassin martial art Hokuto Shinken that travels to Shanghai, China after hearing that his Triad friend Pan Guang-Lin and Pan's sister Yu-Ling are in trouble.