The History of City Hunter

Tsukasa Hojo came off Cat’s Eye wanting something harder. In 1983, while still drawing that series, he tried out a Shinjuku fixer in two short stories, “City Hunter XYZ” and “City Hunter: Double Edge”. Two years later the character got the magazine: City Hunter opened in issue 13 of Weekly Shonen Jump, on February 26, 1985, an issue whose table of contents also carried Dragon Ball and Kinnikuman. February 26 is now marked in Japan as City Hunter Day.

Shueisha’s own encyclopedia, Mangapedia, tells the pivot honestly: launched as orthodox hardboiled fiction, the series stalled; when Hojo turned up the comedy, the lecherous “mokkori” humour and the partner comedy with Kaori, popularity exploded. The hardboiled frame stayed, the jokes paid for it, and the balance became the formula: a gunman story that could be funny without ever going soft.

The run closed in issue 50 of 1991, after six years at the centre of the magazine. The 35 collected volumes kept selling: more than 50 million copies in circulation by 2016. In TV Asahi’s 2021 Manga Sosenkyo poll of some 150,000 voters, City Hunter placed 57th among the most beloved manga ever made.