What Lunar manga and novels are there?
A small, Japan-only print shelf, and one of its artists became the series' second visual signature.
Lunar's world was written by a novelist, and it kept returning to paper. Scenario writer Kei Shigema novelized his own games; a circle of manga artists, above all Akari Funato, extended the stories in comics that were never collected in English. Almost none of it left Japan, which makes the print branch the least documented side of the series in the West, and the side the fan translators reached first.
THE NOVELS
Shigema writes Lunar twiceThe Silver Star Story novelizations
Shigema adapted the remake's expanded script into novels: the game's author revisiting his own world in prose, at novel length. In a rare exception to the print branch's Japan-only rule, the Silver Star Story novelizations are available in English as e-books.
Novelizations across the series
Eternal Blue and Magic School also received novel adaptations in Japan, following the games' stories. Together with the games' scripts, they make Lunar one of the few RPG series whose canon substantially exists in prose.
THE MANGA
Funato and the othersAkari Funato, the second signature
Funato drew Lunar's official ephemera for years (promotional comics, the in-game bromide illustrations) and its most loved manga: Younenki no Owari (Childhood's End), a one-volume story set in Eternal Blue's epilogue, with Hiro, Ruby, a girl named Alice, and the return of Xenobia. Her super-deformed series Lunatic Parade and Lunar Carnival ran alongside.
The adaptation manga
Eternal Blue was adapted in the pages of Asuka DX; Hiroko Touda's Magical School Lunar! manga (two volumes) retells the school story as substantially its own version. Funato's Vane Hikuusen Monogatari (The Vane Airship Story) rounds out a shelf that fan translators, notably the scenery-recall circle, carried into English volume by volume.
The design book
Lunar I & II Official Design Materials Collection (SoftBank, 1997, ISBN 4-89052-662-5) gathered the Mega-CD era's art and long interviews, Shigema and Kubooka across nearly a hundred pages: the primary source for half of what the Library documents about the making of the originals.