When you visit the Noir Caesar official website the hedaer reads "Black Anime" featuring a bevvy of manga series dedicated to exactly these stories from XOGenaSYS to Primus 7 to The Fourth Rope. Noir Caesar and Noir Caesar Studios' co-creator is none other than professional basketball player Johnny O'Bryant who grew up on Toonami and brought his passion to profession starting out in the world of digital comics, graduating to printed comics, animation, and a present day publishing deal with manga publishing giant TOKYOPOP.

Popverse’s Ashley V. Robinson was fortunate enough to sit down virtually with Johnny O'Bryant on a recent episode of Enter the Popverse to get into the nitty gritty of Noir Caesar and TOKYOPOP's partnership and The Fourth Rope making the jump from the page to the screen.

“We expanded our stuff. We started Noir Caesar Studios - which is a branch of Noir Caesar,” O'Bryant explains to Popverse. “and so we were able to partner with a studio in The Philippines that does a lot of work for Netflix and they do a lot of work - outsourcing work - for company studios in Japan. So, they work on series like Psycho-Pass, Naruto, just so many different series they worked on. So, we were able to partner with them and then start a branch called Noir Caesar Studios and, so with that we met our producing partner ... and, so he's been helping us expand our television and animation division.”

Watch our full 23-minute interview with Johnny O'Bryant.

Noir Caesar manga is on sale now.