Akiyo Okubo (born 1982) is a Japanese manga artist from Kanagawa Prefecture. She serialized the historical manga "Vlad Drăculea" in Harta beginning in 2017 and completed the series in ten volumes in 2026. Set in fifteenth-century Wallachia, the manga recounts the life of Vlad III, later remembered as Vlad the Impaler and associated with the legend of Dracula. It depicts a young ruler caught between the Ottoman Empire and Hungary while powerful boyars control much of his own principality, following his efforts to rebuild central authority and defend Wallachian independence through diplomacy, warfare, religion, and court politics. Rather than reducing Vlad to stories of cruelty, the series examines the political circumstances behind his executions and purges while also showing the human cost of those decisions.
