Yan Tieh Hua and her mother are Peking opera performers. Yan is only a teenager when she comes home to find her entire family slaughtered in their home and is subsequently sent to prison for the murders. Ten years after allegedly dying in prison, Yan Tieh Hua is back and looking for blood. The original detective on her case is called out of retirement in order to track her down after Yan livestreams the murder of a local councilman’s son. 

This is a vicious superhero (or supervillain?) origin story with an operatic twist that drops us into a world that hints at the impossible. Yan leans into her opera background and brings a flair for drama and performance to her quest for revenge that wouldn’t be out of place in a Harley Quinn comic. The events that occur after her family’s murder are shrouded in mystery and Yan’s sudden reappearance leave a litter of questions in her destructive wake.

The art style of this manga is clean and crisp, sucking the reader straight into the world to dodge and weave through fight scenes and car chases with characters that are familiarly stylised and easy to distinguish. 

The story is familiar in the sense that if you told someone the premise, they could probably predict the broad strokes of the plot and the personalities of the characters along with it. Minus the ancestor-haunted origami. That one I didn’t see coming. 

Overall, this is a solid, action-packed manga with a comfortably familiar plot and just enough humour to keep it light. I would recommend it to readers who are newer to reading manga. 

Yan Vol. 1 is on sale June 24, 2025, in bookstores, comic shops, and digitally.

Pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, and Forbidden Planet  and Bookshop.org for the UK.