Yusuke Murata Shares Preview of Scrapped ‘Back to the Future’ Manga

Back to the Future fans received quite a blow recently when it was announced that the manga project headed by One Punch Man and Eyeshield 21 illustrator Yusuke Murata had been cancelled.

Along with announcing the project’s unfortunate cancellation on Twitter, Murata shared a few in-progress drafts of his take on Back to the Future. It may make the cancellation sting just a bit more.

With these drafts of the manga project, fans can see what Murata’s takes on Marty McFly’s mother, Lorraine McFly, and the clock tower would have looked like. Most importantly, and most heartbreaking, is seeing how he would have interpreted Marty’s original trip into the past in the first film.

Taking his usual knack for action storyboarding and art and matching it with the film’s intense sequence of Marty driving the DeLorean time machine to escape from the terrorists, this is a good indicator of the kind of intensity and greatness that fans will unfortunately never get to experience in full.

Announced earlier this year during a celebration event for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One in Japan, Murata’s Back to the Future manga project would have picked up where the 1985 original film ended. The manga was even going to be supervised by Back to the Future screenwriter Bob Gale due to its goal of expanding on elements from the original films and adding new ideas of its own.

Japanese website Kono Manga ga Sugoi! was originally slated to publish the series, but the site’s editors unfortunately could not resolve rights issues for many of the films series’ elements and copyrights present in the upcoming work. Kono Manga ga Sugoi! had originally planned to release the first volume on April 20, but this explains why there have not been any updates for the project since its announcement back in February.

If you want to look up more of Yusuke Murata’s fantastic work, you can currently find more of his efforts in the Weekly Young Jump release of One Punch Man, for which he works as an illustrator. Yusuke Murata also regularly shares art that sets the Internet on fire like his sketches of famous Dragon Ball characters. Murata’s art is so great, he has also contributed to Marvel projects, even going so far as to draw an official poster for Spider-Man: Homecoming to commemorate its Japanese box set release.