How can you tell a first printing of Yu Yu Hakusho?
Japanese Yu Yu Hakusho volumes identify themselves at the back. Each Jump Comics tankobon ends with a colophon page listing the book's publication data in Japanese, including the first edition date and, on later copies, the dates and numbers of subsequent impressions. A first printing shows the single original edition line dated to the volume's release month, with no added impression lines. Volume 1's first edition dates to April 1991, and the pattern repeats across the run.
The obi strip adds period evidence. Early printings of the 1990s volumes shipped with obi advertising the anime, then at its ratings peak, along with sales claims and campaign offers. Because obi were disposable packaging, most were thrown away in the decade the books were new, so a documented first printing still wearing its correct anime era obi is the complete artifact and prices accordingly. An obi can migrate between copies, so it corroborates the colophon and never replaces it.
English copies follow the American system. Viz's volumes print a number line on the copyright page, and a first printing's line ends in 1. Viz's Yu Yu Hakusho began in 2003, so English first printings are 2000s objects with that era's Viz colophon and pricing; later reprints keep the covers and quietly change the line. The kanzenban, being a different edition entirely, has its own 2004 and 2005 first edition colophons in Japanese.
The traps in this series are format confusions rather than fakes: tankobon sold as kanzenban, reprints photographed by their identical covers, and mixed language sets counted as uniform. Every one of those errors is caught by the same thirty second habit, photograph the colophon or copyright page and the spine together, and make the listing prove its edition before its printing.
Value expectations stay modest and specific: first printing premiums concentrate on volume 1 in both languages, on obi complete early Japanese volumes from the anime's peak years, and on clean kanzenban first editions. The rest of the run is plentiful, which is good news: this is a completable first printing set, not a lottery.
