By Zack Quaintance — One of film director Hayao Miyazaki’s manga works is getting its first English translation this November from publisher First Second. The book, titled Shuna’s Journey, was first published in Japan in 1983, making it older than I am (ahem).

This is a big deal because (as you probably already know) Miyazaki is one of the greatest animated filmmakers of all-time, with Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke ranking as perhaps his most well-known work. Miyazaki is also an Oscar-winner, having received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2001 for the aforementioned Spirited Away. The new book, due out November 1, is translated by Alex Dudok de Wit.

You can check out the cover below:

This new English translation of Shuna’s Journey will be a 160-page hardcover retailing for $27.99. Again, this is a pretty big deal, enough that the Associated Press actually wrote about (which isn’t the case for most comics news, not even the reveal of the new creative team for — gasp — Batman). That story also noted that some of the story elements in this nearly-40-year-old book are things that Miyazaki later expanded upon in his films Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

It’s all a very big deal, and, to my eyes, a big win for the prominence of North American comics and their increasing place as a medium taken seriously by folks who maybe didn’t pay much attention to them 20 years ago, or even 10 or five.

So yeah, I’m calling it now: this is will be one of the most significant comics of the year.

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He has written about comics for The Beat and NPR Books, among others. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.