Case Closed, Vol. 27

Can Detective Conan crack the case…while trapped in a kid’s body? When ace high school detective Jimmy Kudo is fed a mysterious substance by a pair of nefarious men in black—poof! He is physically transformed into a first grader. Until Jimmy can find a cure for his miniature malady, he takes on the pseudonym Conan Edogawa and continues to solve all the cases that come his way. Conan and his friends take a well-deserved break at a video arcade--until one unlucky gamer is found dead in the seat of a virtual-reality game. As Conan and Rachel investigate, they're joined by an unlikely new accomplice: Rachel's English teacher, Ms. Saintemillion. Outside the classroom, the fast-talking American turns out to have an itchy trigger finger--at least when it comes to video games--and a suspiciously keen interest in Conan. Has the shrunken sleuth stumbled upon a valuable new ally...or an enemy agent?

Gosho Aoyama made his debut in 1986 with Chotto Mattete (Wait a Minute), which won Shogakukan’s prestigious Shinjin Comic Taisho (Newcomer’s Award for Comics) and launched his career as a critically acclaimed, top-selling manga artist. In addition to Case Closed, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2001, Aoyama created the popular manga Yaiba: Samurai Legend, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1992. Aoyama’s manga is greatly influenced by his boyhood love for mystery, adventure, and baseball, and he has cited the tales of Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, along with the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, as some of his childhood favorites.