How can you tell a first printing Slam Dunk volume?

Japanese manga volumes document their own printing history. The colophon, the small block of publication data at the back of the book, prints the date of the first edition and of each subsequent printing, so a first printing is a volume whose colophon shows only the first edition date with no later printing lines beneath it.

For Slam Dunk's Jump Comics volumes the window runs from February 8, 1991 for volume 1 to October 3, 1996 for volume 31, and a true first printing carries the matching 1991 or era date for its volume. Completeness adds the furniture: the obi strip where one was issued, the advertising inserts of the period, and the absence of the later-edition marks that reprints carry.

Condition language matters as much as printing: 1990s Jump Comics were mass-market paperbacks on acidic stock, so tanning at the page edges is normal aging rather than damage, and sellers' photographs of the page block tell you more than any claim in a listing. Judge the colophon first, the paper second, the seller's adjectives last.