It took a minute – as in 40 years – to get an English language edition of this gender-bending story of high school hi-jinx – and romance – but now it's here, courtesy of the powers that be at Peow2, who've put together a very nice edition – the first of three!  It is crisply printed in tankobon fashion, complete with obi-band, in (mostly) black & white, with duo-tone sections and occasional full color.

Stop!! Hibari-Kun! may, to North American readers, at least, seem at first to be a kind of next-level Ramna 1/2 – except... it was serialized roughly five years before Ramna 1/2 began!  Hibari is a (born) boy who for all intents and purposes is a girl – and not just any girl, but the most popular girl in their high school!  The series opens when the series protagonist (and stand-in for the reader), Kohsaku Sakamoto's mother dies and he is sent to live with the family of a Yakuza boss (a mystery which is more or less explained early on) who has four children: three girls... and Hibari – who immediately falls for Kohsaku, who is, shall we say, conflicted, about the situation, and so the hi-jinx begin!  And Eguchi's deft employment of manga's caricatural humor vocabulary – which includes frequent authorial intrusions – makes for a fairly riotous reading experience.

Stop!! Hibari-Kun! was serialized in Shonen Jump from 1981 to 1983*, the (most?) popular weekly manga anthology in Japan, which was/is aimed at the (largely male) adolescent market.  In other words, this was not some niche work, but rather a hugely popular series.  So popular, in fact, that it was made into a television anime series that ran for 35(?) episodes.  *(and then concluded, after a long hiatus, in 2010)

Take a moment to dive into the gender fluidity on hand here with Madeline Blondeau's exploration of the series on Paste, HERE.