King of Thorn | |
Cover of volume 2 of the Japanese edition
|
|
いばらの王 (Ibara no Ou) |
|
---|---|
Genre | Action, Survival horror |
Manga | |
Written by | Yūji Iwahara |
Published by | Enterbrain |
English publisher | |
Demographic | Seinen |
Magazine | Comic Beam |
Original run | October 2002 – October 2005 |
Volumes | 6 |
Anime film | |
Directed by | Kazuyoshi Katayama |
Written by | Kazuyoshi Katayama Hiroshi Yamaguchi |
Music by | Toshihiko Sahashi |
Studio | Sunrise |
Licensed by | |
Released | May 1, 2010 |
Runtime | 109 minutes |
King of Thorn (いばらの王 Ibara no Ou?) is a Japanese fantastique manga series written and illustrated by Yuji Iwahara. It was published in by Enterbrain in the seinen magazine Monthly Comic Beam between October 2002 and October 2005 and collected in six bound volumes. It is licensed in North America by Tokyopop, with the final volume published in November 2008. The series is about a group of people who are put in suspended animation to escape a mysterious plague that turns people to stone, and upon waking there appears to be only seven survivors in a world run wild—including a teenager, Kasumi, and British, Marco Owen. The survivors soon discover that the entire ruin is filled with strange, dinosaur-like creatures and other monstrous aberrations of nature. Thinking that a great amount of time passed since their arrival on the island, soon the survivors discover not only that their sleep was indeed too short to label such dramatic changes as natural occurrence, but also that the situation in and of itself is far greater than they could imagine.
A feature anime film adaptation produced by Sunrise and directed by Kazuyoshi Katayama was released on May 1, 2010.
King of Thorn is a science fiction survivor drama. After a viral infection known as the Medusa virus lands in Siberia and spreads contagiously throughout Earth, 160 humans are chosen as candidates to experiment a cure against the virus by an organization called Venus Gate. As the story begins, Kasumi is selected as one of the 160 people for the experiment. She is forced to enter treatment and cold sleep without her twin sister Shizuku, whom she cares much about.