A-

In English for the first time, queer classic Stop!! Hibari-Kun! is more relevant than ever

Stop!! Hibari-Kun! has become more topical than creator Hisashi Eguchi likely ever intended.

By Madeline Blondeau  |  January 13, 2026 | 10:00am
Image credits: Stop!! Hibari-Kun! (Peow)
Anime Reviews Stop!! Hibari-kun!
In English for the first time, queer classic Stop!! Hibari-Kun! is more relevant than ever

It’s hard to read the 1981 Shonen Jump romantic comedy Stop!! Hibari-Kun!, which centers on a non-op transgender teenager in student athletics, and not drag in the weight of contemporary baggage. Fast and loose gags which involve trans teens competing in sports or using the girls’ locker room read differently today, when rhetoric around transgender people has reached absurd—and deadly—new lows. But these were the furthest things from Hisashi Eguchi’s mind, over 40 years ago. Stop!! Hibari-kun! treats concerns like being outed as jokes, concocted by goofy antagonists who want to get one over on the main heroine. Eguchi handles their fuss over Hibari’s anatomy or sexual morality as gags because, on some level, he doesn’t take them seriously. As the writer and artist, he uses sequential storytelling to build jokes around a cherubic, sexually desirable young girl who doesn’t understand her family’s hang-ups and chooses not to internalize them. 

Stop!! Hibari-Kun! opens on Kohsaku, a teenage boy whose father drank himself to death, as his mother dies in hospice from an unspecified illness. As per her last wishes, the boy travels to Tokyo to board with Ibari Oozora, a mustachioed mob boss with a rank-and-file squad of goons in sunglasses at his beck and call. No sooner does Kohsaku arrive than he is introduced to Ibari’s daughters—Suzume, Tsubame, and Tsugumi. No girl takes his interest, however, quite like Hibari—flirtatious and funny, she makes an immediate impression on the young man. When Ibari spills the beans about Hibari’s birth sex in the first chapter, Kohsaku reacts with stock standard revulsion. It doesn’t last long; by the fourth chapter, he’s already having wet dreams about his new housemate. While his loud resistance never lets up entirely, the boy begins to entertain being attracted to Hibari. However, he’ll have to get in line: Hibari is the most popular girl at school. To keep her safe—and preserve family honor—Kohsaku must stow the secret about her birth sex.

In a modern landscape, Stop!! Hibari-Kun! is refreshing for its blunt flirtations with realistic ugliness. While the core conceit is heightened, moments of Hibari defending her identity to an angry father or disgusted sibling resonate as real trans experiences; a moment in which her classmates scheme to assault her to “prove” her gender is chilling in a world after Brandon Teena. Yet an era of young adult comics pitched towards queer teenagers has approached trans identity as it pertains to teens with kid gloves and validity vaguespeak. Such depictions can feel disconnected from reality—comfortable escapism and nice “what ifs” that don’t show queer characters against active, malicious bigotry. While escape is important, it doesn’t arm a reader with tools to disentangle hatred because it presumes the reader is already progressive-minded. What’s more, escapism doesn’t allow a trans reader to find the absurdity in cruelty, therefore making it feel more serious than it would if they were able to lampoon it. The fact that Eguchi does just this, albeit imperfectly, is not only modern but still feels novel by weight of comparison.

That said, this is a manga from the early ’80s. In acknowledgement, North American publisher Peow2 has included a disclaimer at the top of this volume, warning readers of dated caricatures and stereotypes within. Indeed, it’s hard to bring up Hibari-Kun for a general audience and not at least mention Eguchi’s questionable depictions of race. In this first volume, for instance, a student at Hibari’s school has a comically elongated face, bulging lips, and a ring through his nose. It’s an unfortunate and inadvertently hateful visual gag, born in a decade in which Sanrio openly marketed characters like Sambo, Hannah, and squat islander caricatures Binbinba. But while certain nomenclature and depictions may be outdated, the overall themes of Stop!! Hibari-Kun! are forward-thinking in 2026. Eguchi does not present his heroine as a problem to be solved; instead, the main tension is Kohsaku’s inability to see Hibari on her own terms. 

This feels more timeless and prescient than much “coming out” YA media of the past decade, because it navigates regressive norms to arrive in transgressive territory. Kohsaku is not a well-meaning ally of the queer community—he’s a lusty teenage boy with the same sexual hang-ups as every other guy in the story. Yet because of Hibari’s fixation on him, he’s forced to ask complicated questions about his sexuality that play out as a flirtatious rom-com. It predates the gender-bending romantic antics of Ranma 1/2, with none of the magical macguffins to cushion potentially uncomfortable questions about attraction. Here, Kohsaku must make good with the fact that he is physically attracted to a non-op AMAB peer, and much of the humor is at the expense of his loud denials.

What this forces readers to grapple with, ultimately, asks more of them than something like Ranma or the later, similarly absurd sex-change yuri series KashiMashi. The reader is taken down the same path as the main POV, as they (presumably) open their mind to the idea of these two characters hooking up. While there is something to be said for the hegemonic femininity Hibari embodies, even the suggestion that a trans woman can achieve this beauty is audacious. It flies in the face of decades of “men in dress” gags, from Looney Tunes to what feels like the whole of British comedy. Eguchi’s belief in Hibari shows that while he might find her funny, he ultimately empathizes with and doesn’t want to see harm befall her. 

That empathy is what grounds Stop!! Hibari-Kun! throughout its absurdity, and elevates it as a strong example of early queer representation in popular shonen. Where a lesser series would lean into making a spectacle of Hibari, Eguchi’s care for his principal cast ensures that the reader isn’t led towards hateful misconceptions. If anything, those willful misunderstandings— characters failing to meet Hibari on her terms—are often embodied by antagonists who want to out, humiliate, or otherwise wrong the character. The shonen structure ensures that these characters are in the wrong, as they are tropish roadblocks to overcome in the context of the larger narrative. As is the promise in romantic comedies of the era, each new trial nudges Kohsaku and Hibari closer toward a potential union.

Peow2’s releases are based on Shogakukan’s “Complete” editions, first released in 2010 and reissued in 2012. This is the first of three volumes, which will conclude with the proper ending Eguchi drew between 2009 and 2010 based on his original storyboards. Originally, Hibari-Kun was cut short by artist protest; fed up with Jump’s weekly deadlines, Eguchi locked himself in a hotel and refused to leave, which prompted his editor-in-chief, Shigeo Nishimura, to can the series in retaliation—even with a successful anime adaptation airing! This bore out into an eventual boon for English readers, however. Reading the first book of Stop!! Hibari-Kun!, its mercifully short length comes as a gift in a landscape of manga shelves sagging with tome upon ceaseless tome of non-descript adolescent romance. For all their length and multitude, few can match the wit, heart, and forward-facing attitudes found in just this single volume’s story.

But for all his comic’s transgressions, it’s Eguchi’s crisp and stylish art—printed here in crisp, sturdy pages between a microtextured dustjacket—that steals the show. The future commercial artist demonstrates a canny spatial awareness and momentum to his panel layouts; readers are pelted with visual gags which segue into each other, set up by things like sliding doors or the crunching of snacks. Jokes and emotional beats are given proper space to breathe, as fashionable, attractive characters pose alongside absurdist stereotypes. While the plot is notable in and of itself, the art elevates it to must-have status. It’s a minor tragedy that Japanese comics, as a commercial enterprise, push perfectionists like Eguchi out in favor of repetition-prone workhorses. Few artists who have gone through Jump have as keen a grasp on atmosphere and momentum as is on display in Stop!! Hibari-Kun!.

Keep scrolling for more great stories.
 
Join the discussion...