What are the English editions of Magic Knight Rayearth?
Four editions, and the first one reads backwards.
English Rayearth is a history of American manga publishing in miniature. Tokyopop licensed the series in 1997 and serialized it in its magazine MixxZine, in the era when English manga was still flipped to read left-to-right and Rayearth II was simply numbered as volumes 4 to 6. Tokyopop later re-released the same translation unflipped, in the original right-to-left, in 2003–04.
The license has moved twice since: to Dark Horse, which published omnibus editions in 2011–12 and reported nearly 200,000 copies sold in the United States, and then home to Kodansha Comics, whose twenty-fifth-anniversary hardcovers are the current collector’s edition. Telling the editions apart is a page of its own in this archive.
THE TOKYOPOP YEARS
1997 to 2004MixxZine · 1997
Rayearth entered English as a magazine serial in Tokyopop’s MixxZine, the anthology that taught a generation of American readers what manga was, one flipped chapter at a time.
The flipped volumes · 1999 to 2001
The first collected edition reads left-to-right, its art mirrored, and continues the numbering straight through both series: Rayearth II appears as volumes 4, 5, and 6. For many American fans this is the Rayearth of childhood, mirror-writing and all.
The unflipped re-release · 2003 to 2004
Tokyopop reissued the series reading right-to-left, restored the two-series split, and gave Rayearth II its own numbers 1 to 3. Same translation era, different object: the two runs sit side by side in secondhand shops and are confused constantly.
THE LATER KEEPERS
2011 to todayDark Horse omnibus · 2011 to 2012
Announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2009 in honor of CLAMP’s twentieth anniversary: two omnibus volumes, published July 6, 2011 and April 12, 2012, gathering each series entire. Dark Horse put the American total for the manga at almost 200,000 copies.
Kodansha hardcover box sets · 2019 to 2020
For the manga’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Kodansha Comics released the series digitally and in two hardcover box sets of three volumes each, from November 26, 2019 to December 29, 2020: large, uniform, and built to be kept. This is the edition the current shelf recommends first.
Kodansha paperbacks · 2023 on
Announced at Anime NYC 2022, a standard paperback edition began December 12, 2023, returning the series to ordinary bookstore pricing for the first time in the Kodansha era.
NAMES IN TRANSLATION
What the editions call thingsRune-Gods
The gods are Mashin in Japanese. “Rune-Gods” is the name fixed by the official English anime, and it has followed the series through its English life.
Selece, Celes, Ceres; Windam, Windom
Umi’s water god appears across editions as Selece, Seles, Celes, or Ceres; Fuu’s wind god is Windam in Japanese and most translations, but Windom in Kodansha’s English manga. A copy’s spelling is a quick tell of which edition you are holding.