Choujin Locke Review: The Immortal Esper Who Outlived His Own Author

When I was a kid hiding from the world in my room, I had this idea that the loneliest thing imaginable was to be the last one left at the end of a long day. Everyone goes home and you are still there. I found Choujin Locke much later, as an adult, after I started reading older sci-fi to understand where manga came from. And the first thing that hit me was that Locke is exactly that feeling stretched across centuries. He is the one who is always still there after everyone else has gone home. I did not expect a comic that started in 1967 to put its finger on something I had felt as a small, friendless kid. But it did.

Quick Take

• One of manga's longest-running sci-fi works — Yuki Hijiri drew Locke from 1967 until his death in 2022, an astonishing span of one artist following one character.
• Locke's immortality is not a power fantasy. It is the source of the series' quiet grief — he protects people knowing he will bury all of them.
• Rated T (Teen): sci-fi action and violence, psychic manipulation, and heavy themes of loss, but nothing graphic.

Story Overview

Choujin Locke is structured less like one continuous plot and more like a chain of self-contained stories spread across an enormous future timeline — from near-future Earth out to galactic federations and empires far in the future. The constant through all of it is Locke, an esper who does not age and does not die. He has telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation across light-years, the ability to heal his own body, and a "learning ability" that lets him absorb other espers' powers (he picks up his signature Psycho Spear technique from another esper, Amazona). He can also use "waka-gaeri" — age regression — to appear as a child.

The series' recurring engine is simple and devastating. Somewhere in human space, an esper or a power decides to reshape humanity by force — usually building some kind of psychic empire — and Locke, who would rather be left alone, gets pulled in. He has seen this story before. He has seen how it ends. That weariness is the turning point of nearly every arc: the moment Locke stops withdrawing and decides, again, to act.

There is no single ending, because there could not be one. Hijiri kept drawing Locke for over fifty years and the saga only stopped when its author died in October 2022, leaving two works unfinished — one of which, "Shōkei" (Admirations), was completed and published in 2023 with art help from a longtime assistant. So the series ends the way Locke's own life never does: not with resolution, but because the person carrying it forward finally ran out of time.

Characters

Locke — The immortal esper at the center of everything. What makes him compelling is not his near-limitless power but what time has done to him. He is quiet, solitary, and reluctant. He keeps denying he is "Locke the Superman." He has watched civilizations rise and collapse, and the result is not bitterness but a strange, worn-down compassion: he keeps choosing to protect people he has no reason to believe he can keep.

Lady Khan — The antagonist of "Witch's Century" (魔女の世紀). She plots to build a thousand-year empire ruled by espers, and to clear Locke out of her path she raises a weapon specifically designed to kill him.

Jessica — Khan's weapon. She is a girl with a rare power that neutralizes and dissolves other espers' abilities. Khan plants hatred of Locke in her as a child, then erases her memory and sends her — under the name Amelia — to get close to Federation Commander Yamaki. The cruelty is that Jessica does not know she is being used.

Lord Leon — In his own arc, Leon is an esper and space pirate hunting the Astris conglomerate and its head, Great Jorg. Leon is not a simple villain; his rage is rooted in what Jorg did to him and to his sister, Flora. His arc is one of the saga's saddest, and his fate at Locke's hands is one of the strangest punishments in the series.

What I Love About It

The arc that stayed with me is "Witch's Century," and specifically the way it traps you between two people who should be on opposite sides. Lady Khan's plan is not just to defeat Locke with brute force — she engineers a human being to do it. Jessica is raised from childhood to hate him, then has her memory wiped clean so she can be inserted, as the amnesiac "Amelia," next to Commander Yamaki, who is the man trying to stop Khan. And then the thing happens that the whole scheme did not account for: Yamaki and Jessica fall in love. Two people, both being moved like pieces on a board, find something real in the middle of a manipulation neither of them understands.

What gets me is that the series refuses to make this clean. Jessica's power is literally the power to undo espers — she is the natural enemy of everything Locke is. Yet she is also a victim, robbed of her own memories and pointed at a target like a gun. I love that Hijiri builds the emotional weight not around Locke's strength but around two ordinary people caught in a plan bigger than they are. By the time Locke and Jessica finally meet, you do not want a fight. You want someone to tell her the truth. For a series often remembered as a "psychic superhero space opera," that ache is what proves it is something more.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The Lord Leon arc broke me. Leon is a space pirate striking only at the Astris conglomerate, and the head of that conglomerate, Great Jorg, quietly refuses to report the raids — because Jorg is hiding what he did. The Federation, suspicious of Jorg, asks Locke to investigate, and while chasing Leon, Locke meets Leon's sister, Flora. Then comes the gut-punch the whole arc is built around: through Jorg's scheming, Leon ends up killing his own sister Flora. The person he was fighting for becomes the person he destroys.

After that, Leon is pure revenge, ready to burn everything down, and Locke has to stop him. But the way Locke ends it is what I cannot forget. He does not simply kill Leon. He uses his power to regress Leon all the way back into an infant — to start his life over from nothing. It is mercy and it is horror at the same time. Locke does not get to die and start over. He just keeps going. So when he hands Leon the one thing he himself can never have — a clean beginning — it lands as the most quietly merciful and most lonely thing in the series.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• A genuinely singular achievement — one artist, one character, more than fifty years.
• The immortality theme is handled as grief, not power fantasy, with real emotional payoff in arcs like Witch's Century and Lord Leon.
• Self-contained arcs mean you can start almost anywhere and get a complete story.
• A foundational pillar of Japanese sci-fi manga and the esper genre.

Cons

• No licensed English manga edition exists, so you need Japanese (or a lot of patience).
• The art shifts dramatically across the decades, which can feel jarring.
• Sixty-plus volumes with no single overarching conclusion is a huge, sprawling commitment — that's either the appeal or the dealbreaker, and this one won't work for everyone.

Is Choujin Locke Worth Reading?

If you want a tight, finished story you can knock out in a weekend, no. But if the idea of an immortal who keeps choosing compassion across centuries — and the loneliness that costs him — speaks to you, this is one of the most rewarding things in classic sci-fi manga. Start with a self-contained arc like Witch's Century or Lord Leon and let it earn your trust.

Where to Buy

No English release yet. That just means you find it before everyone else does.

There's no licensed English manga edition — the Japanese print and digital releases are the only legitimate way to read it.

Search Choujin Locke on Amazon.co.jp →

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