How can you tell a first printing of City Hunter?

Japanese books carry their own birth certificates. At the back of every Jump Comics volume is the colophon page (the okudzuke), printing the book’s publication data and its printing history: a first printing shows the volume’s first-edition date and no earlier printings beneath it. For City Hunter volume 1, that means a January 1986 date line; later printings of the same book add their own dates below, and the stack of dates is the whole verdict. The cover cannot tell you: Shueisha reprinted these volumes for years behind identical covers.

City Hunter gives the checker a second tool most series do not: three distinct ISBN blocks. Volumes 1 to 20 carry ISBNs in the 4-08-852381 to 852400 run (1986 to 1989); volumes 21 to 29 jump to 852612 to 852620 (1989 to 1990); the last six volumes sit in a separate block, 852191 to 852196 (1991 to 1992). A spine whose number falls outside its volume’s block is a later printing wearing an early cover’s clothes.

The market treats this seriously. In Japan, complete all-first-edition sets of the 35 volumes are advertised and sold as a distinct category, and standout single volumes, the first book, the finale, early volumes in fine shape, are listed individually as first printings at collector prices. The obi, the paper band around the jacket, matters too: a first printing that kept its obi is the complete artefact, and the hardest version of any volume to find.