Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer
Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, known in Japan as , is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Satoshi Mizukami. It was serialized in Shōnen Gahōsha's "seinen" manga magazine "Young King OURs" from April 2005 to August 2010, with its chapters collected in ten "tankōbon" volumes. The series is published in North America by Seven Seas Entertainment. An anime television series adaptation is set to premiere in July 2022 on the Animeism programming block. Plot. Yuuhi Amamiya is a young, misanthropic college student who one day wakes up to find a lizard on his  bed. The lizard explains that Yuuhi has been chosen as a Beast Knight, a magical warrior destined to help a Princess defeat a Mage seeking to destroy the world with a giant mallet floating in space called the Biscuit Hammer. While Yuuhi initially is not interested in getting involved, he changes his mind when he meets the Princess, Samidare Asahina, who tells him her intent to defeat the mage and save the world so she can destroy the world herself instead. Media. Manga. Written and illustrated by Satoshi Mizukami, "Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer" was serialized in Shōnen Gahōsha's  seinen magazine "Young King OURs" from 28 April 2005 to 30 August 2010. Shōnen Gahōsha collected its chapters in ten "tankōbon" volumes, released from 27 January 2006 to 30 November 2010. JManga began publishing the series digitally in North America in February 2012, and published five volumes before the company shut down in May 2013. It was subsequently licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment in November 2013. Crunchyroll added the series to their online catalog in September 2014, and BookWalker added the series on 18 November 2015. The series has been collected into ten "tankōbon" volumes, which were published by Seven  Seas in five two-in-one omnibus volumes. Anime. An anime television series adaptation was announced on 24 January 2022. Nobuaki Nakanishi is directing the series, while Satoshi Mizukami, the author of the manga, and Yūichirō Momose are writing the scripts. It will premiere in July 2022 on the Animeism programming block on MBS, TBS, and BS-TBS. Muse Communication licensed the series in South and Southeast Asia. Reception. In 2011, the series was nominated for the 42nd Seiun Awards in the comics category. Reviewing the first omnibus volume for "Anime News Network", Rebecca Silverman commented that the story "takes  a while to hit its stride, but when it does, putting it down becomes difficult", writing that "underneath the goofy start and typically comedic devices of absurdly powerful girls and talking animals, "Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer" is hiding a very dark story" which makes it "feel very different from most of the other shōnen series currently available in English." She gave it an overall grade of B. Rebecca Silverman would later list the series as the runner-up for the "Best Reworking of an Old Genre" spot on her 2015 manga retrospective article for "Anime News Network". Charlie Jane  Anders of "io9" placed the series at number ten on her list of "10 Heroic Prophecies That Didn't Turn Out The Way the Heroes Expected".