- Fantasy
- Unico collection
- Ages 8–12
Unico
Part of the collectionUnico→Best for 8-12s who love tender fantasy: a beautifully drawn, beginner-friendly manga about a kind unicorn, his cat friends and the goddess who hunts him.
- Books3 / 8
- Arcs1
- Span2024–2026
- StatusOngoing
The series
At a glance.
Unico, a little unicorn who can fill hearts with love, so enrages the goddess Venus that she banishes him across space and time until he forgets everything he was. Alone, he is taken in by a resourceful watch-cat, Chloe, and across the saga he wakes in a factory town ruled by a cold machine called Mother, then finds himself lost in a windswept desert, while his devoted cat friends train to cross time and space to reach him before Venus and her monstrous hunters do. Written by Samuel Sattin with Eisner-winning art by Gurihiru and developed with Tezuka Productions, the series widens Osamu Tezuka's classic into a story of love, memory and loyalty across impossible distances, carrying real emotional weight while keeping faith in the power of kindness.
Best for 8-12s who love tender fantasy: a beautifully drawn, beginner-friendly manga about a kind unicorn, his cat friends and the goddess who hunts him.
Primary themes
Overall tone
- Heartwarming
- Adventurous
- Bittersweet
- Suspenseful
A continuous saga, read in order from Unico: Awakening through Hunted and Lost. Three of a planned eight volumes have been published.
One arc
The shape of the series.
- INarrative arcLow sensitivity
Unico's journey home
Banished and memory-lost, Unico journeys through unkind worlds with the cats who love him, pursued by Venus and her hunters.
A single continuous story told across the published volumes. Awakening banishes Unico and pairs him with the watch-cat Chloe; Hunted traps him in a factory town ruled by the machine Mother as Venus unleashes a relentless hunter; Lost strands him in a desert while his cat friends train to cross space and time to reach him first. The stakes and jeopardy build book to book, so the volumes should be read in sequence, each deepening the saga's questions of memory, loyalty and whether kindness can survive an unkind world.
Fit check
Right for your reader?
Where the series lands by age
- 1
- 3
- 5
- 7
- 9
- 11
- 13
- 15
- 17
- 19
- Best fit · 8–12
- Read aloud · 8–11
- Independent · 8–12
Reluctant-reader friendliness
High
Read-aloud quality
Workable
Adult crossover
High
Grows with the reader
Not especially
Sensitivity envelope
Low overall, and consistent.
Where it sits
In conversation with other series.
Similar in feel
Different shelves, same wavelength.
- The Tea Dragon Society →
- Hilda →
About the author