Angel Heart is a manga series written and illustrated by Tsukasa Hojo published in the Weekly Comic Bunch from 2001 throughout 2010. After the cancellation of Bunch, the manga was renewed in Monthly Comic Zenon under the title of Angel Heart: 2nd Season, which ran from 2010 to 2017. An animated television series based on the manga aired in Japan from October 3, 2005 to September 25, 2006. The author mentioned in the first tankōbon volume that Angel Heart shares the same characters as City Hunter but is not its continuation. Therefore, the events take place in a parallel universe.
Plot
A young woman stands on top of a building in Shinjuku as she receives a call from her handler. The handler, who calls her "Glass Heart", congratulates her with a job well done regarding her latest kill, which he refers to as her 50th. Glass Heart recounts the day's events. She had just killed a mansitting on a park bench with a silenced gun. As she was leaving the park, a small girl runs in with some ice cream and Glass Heart realizes that she has just killed the father of a little girl. With that she jumps off the building, impaling her chest on the iron spiked fence below. At the same time, Kaori Makimura is running late for an appointment to take wedding photos with her husband, the "City Hunter" Ryo Saeba. When she sees a girl about to be run over by a truck, she jumps and pushes the girl out of the way before the truck hits her. A short while later, she is declared brain dead and her heart is harvested for organ donation, as she had a donor card on her when she died. However, the Organization, needing a heart for their assassin, steals Kaori's heart while it is in transit and implants it into Glass Heart's body. Glass Heart is transported to Taiwan, where she remains in a coma for a year. During that time, she is haunted by the images of the people she has killed, along with the images of the donor Kaori as well as Ryo Saeba of whom she does not know. She wakes up after one year to find out who these people are. She travels back to Shinjuku, and after several close events, manages to track down the "City Hunter". He has retired from his role since his wife's death. Upon finding that Glass Heart is the recipient of Kaori's heart, Ryo decides to adopt her as his daughter, and is also given a name provided by her real father: Xiang Ying. The former mercenary now tries to help the former assassin move on with a normal life in the outside world.
The series debuted on May 15, 2001 in the first issue of Weekly Comic Bunch. The story developed from a short story by Hojo called The Eyes of the Assassin. The basic script took five years to create. The series was published in 33 volumes from October 2001 until October 2010. A republished edition, titled Angel Heart: 1st Season, was published by Tokuma Shoten between March 19, 2012 and February 20, 2013 consisting of 24 volumes. Due to the discontinuation of Weekly Comic Bunch in 2010 the series was moved to Monthly Comic Zenon under a new title, Angel Heart: 2nd Season. 2nd Season was serialized from the December 2010 issue up until July 2017, lasting 16 collected volumes.. In 2016, an English version of the manga started being serialized online via the official SMAC website, but only 13 chapters were published before SMAC stopped publishing new chapters.
Angel Heart has been adapted into a live action TV drama starring Ayaka Miyoshi as Xiang-Ying and Takaya Kamikawa as Ryo Saeba. Yuuya Takahashi has written the scripts and Shunsuke Kariyama is directing the series. The series began airing on October 11, 2015 on Nippon TV with a 12.5% audience share. It is being streamed by Crunchyroll.
