Twin Knight (Good Friend)

Good Friend
May 1958

Although The Twin Knights (1958-59) is a follow up to the original Princess Knight [Shojo Club] (1953-56), in a strange way, it owes much of it’s existence to a little-known work of Osamu Teukza’s known as The Kokeshi Detective Bureau (1957).

The reason for that is because The Kokeshi Detective Bureau (1957), which was being published in the popular girl’s magazine Good Friend, was doing so poorly that the editorial staff began to push Tezuka to continue the story of Princess Knight [Shojo Club] (1953-56), which had wrapped up publication in Shojo Club the year before.

And so, Tezuka dusted off the (already well-known) Princess Knight title (it wouldn’t be renamed Twin Knight until it was collected in a book edition in 1960), and crafted an eerily similar gender-bending story of Sapphire and Franz’s children – a twin brother and sister named Prince Daisy and Princess Violetta.

And so, the series that would become known as The Twin Knights (1958-59) began its monthly serialization in the January 1958 issue of Good Friend and would be published for 18 consecutive months until the storyline wrapped up in June 1959.

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