Case Closed, Vol. 53

Can Detective Conan crack the case…while trapped in a kid’s body? When ace high school detective Jimmy Kudo is fed a mysterious substance by a pair of nefarious men in black—poof! He is physically transformed into a first grader. Until Jimmy can find a cure for his miniature malady, he takes on the pseudonym Conan Edogawa and continues to solve all the cases that come his way. The Kaito Kid has vowed to steal a famous artist’s latest painting—and Conan is at the scene! But while Conan prepares to stop the theft, a man is killed under his nose. Is the Kid a thief and a murderer? Then a small boy is the only witness to a crime, but no one can make heads or tails of his strange testimony. And Conan is distracted by his suspicions about Rachel’s new friend Eisuke, who bears an eerie resemblance to one of the Men in Black!

Gosho Aoyama made his debut in 1986 with Chotto Mattete (Wait a Minute), which won Shogakukan’s prestigious Shinjin Comic Taisho (Newcomer’s Award for Comics) and launched his career as a critically acclaimed, top-selling manga artist. In addition to Case Closed, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2001, Aoyama created the popular manga Yaiba: Samurai Legend, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1992. Aoyama’s manga is greatly influenced by his boyhood love for mystery, adventure, and baseball, and he has cited the tales of Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, along with the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, as some of his childhood favorites.