Ioannis Mentzas, 1972-2026

Features Austin Price | August 17, 2026 Photo of Ioannis Mentzas by Naoko Maeda. “Ioannis “Yani” Mentzas — co-founder alongside Hiroki Sakai of the publishing house Vertical and, at the time of his death, Editorial Director of Kodansha USA — passed in late January of this year at the age of 53 after a brief struggle with lung cancer; he is survived by his brother, Spiros. Mentzas’ death likely registered on few outside the industry; in the six months since his passing the only acknowledgments I have seen boil down to a small memorial on Kodansha USA’s Instagram account and a two paragraph obituary on Anime News Network that cited as its only source the aforementioned Insagram post. In many ways it’s no surprise. Even at its zenith, Vertical — and the Vertical Comics imprint through which it released manga — was far from a household name, much less so after it was folded into Kodansha USA in 2020, all evidence of the imprint’s existence reduced to a mere blurb on the copyrights page that still identifies several of Kodansha’s titles as “A Vertical Book.” Few mourned the passing of the imprint itself; how much more likely were they to mourn the passing of a man whom they knew as but ...