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If there’s anything we learned from the 1980s sci-fi classic Innerspace, other than that young Dennis Quaid was super dreamy, it’s that there is tons and tons of untold drama taking place amidst the complicated inner workings of our bodies. Also, it taught us that probably you shouldn’t sign up for mysterious medical experiments, lest you end up shrunk down to the size of a microbe and find yourself hurtling around someone’s rectal cavity at breakneck speeds.

Recognizing that there’s a lot of potential for action and adventure in a story set inside the human body, a Japanese manga artist has introduced a new manga series which follows a team of red and white blood cells trying to protect the human body they call home.

Of course, no matter how dramatic and complicated the human body is, it probably wouldn’t make for a very exciting comic book to just have a bunch of actual red blood cells just floating along in the blood stream and talking to each other, so Akane Shimizu, creator of the series – which is titled Hataraku Saibou – did the logical(?) thing and represented the various cells as human characters.

The suspense is killing us

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There aren’t a whole lot of details about the plot available at time of writing, but based on images, it looks like each of the various cell types will be portrayed in a way that’s characteristic of the real-life cell’s job. So, the red blood cells are depicted as delivery girls (side note: in their red jackets they actually kind of look like female versions of Fry from Futurama), the white blood cells are a squad of elite fighters, the platelets have big glue gun-looking weapons and such.

It looks like, based on what little in the way of plot synopsis we could dig up, the series will be a sort of action/drama/comedy hybrid (but then again, what manga isn’t, really?), splitting its time between the action-oriented scenes of the white blood cells and platelets, and the more day-in-the-life stuff of the frantically working red blood cells and whatnot. It’s also safe to bet that the stories will be at least somewhat educational, but that doesn’t seem to be the main focus.

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Hataraku Saibou is actually a continuation of a one-off work, Saibou no Hanashi, from the same author, which received the Sirius New Age Award for excellent manga from a new author.

There’s no word yet on if or when a foreign publisher will pick up the manga for publication outside of Japan. Something tells us anthropomorphic blood cell action manga don’t make the jump west very often, so hardcore readers may need to cross their fingers for a fan translation and/or learn Japanese.

Source: Natalie
Images: Amazon.co.jp, Wikimedia Commons