The Magic Knight Rayearth Manga Gallery
Six volumes, two parts, one complete story: 1994 to 1996.
Magic Knight Rayearth ran in Kodansha’s Nakayoshi from November 1993, and Kodansha collected it in three tankōbon in 1994–95. The sequel, Magic Knight Rayearth II, followed in the same magazine from March 1995 and filled three more volumes by April 1996. Six slim books carry the whole of Cephiro: the rescue that is not a rescue, and the harder story CLAMP built on top of it.
The dates and ISBNs below are the first-edition record, volume by volume. They are also the collector’s checklist: any Japanese Rayearth set that does not match this table is a later printing or a different edition wearing the same art.
RAYEARTH I
Nakayoshi · November 1993 to February 1995Volume 1 · July 22, 1994
ISBN 4-06-334642-0. The opening of Part I: three eighth-graders from three different schools fall out of a Tokyo Tower field trip into Cephiro, a world held together by one person’s prayer. The quest that follows looks like a rescue. It is not one.
Volume 2 · November 22, 1994
ISBN 4-06-334643-9. The middle of Part I: the girls master their elemental magic and begin the search for the three sleeping Rune-Gods, while the cracks in the official story widen.
Volume 3 · March 6, 1995
ISBN 4-06-334644-7. The end of Part I, and one of the most discussed endings in shōjo manga: Princess Emeraude summoned the Magic Knights herself, because no one from Cephiro could do what she needed done.
RAYEARTH II
Nakayoshi · March 1995 to April 1996Volume 1 · July 26, 1995
ISBN 4-06-334659-5. A year later: the girls, carrying what they did, are drawn back to a Cephiro that is crumbling without its Pillar, as three foreign worlds sail in to claim it.
Volume 2 · December 18, 1995
ISBN 4-06-334660-9. Autozam, Fahren, and Chizeta press their invasions, and the question of the next Pillar narrows to two candidates who both want the system gone.
Volume 3 · April 23, 1996
ISBN 4-06-334661-7. The close of the whole work: Mokona reveals what it is, Hikaru becomes the Pillar, and her first act is to abolish the office so no one carries a world alone again.
THE ART ON THE PAGE
CLAMP in NakayoshiRobots at storybook scale
CLAMP loved robot anime and wanted them in a girls’ magazine. The Rune-Gods are drawn as living creatures first and machines second, which is why the scale problem the artists complained about never reads as one: the girls are never framed against the full height of their gods.
Faces, not cockpits
The artists deliberately left the cockpits out of the designs so the Knights’ faces could stay in the frame during battle. It is the series’ signature image: a small girl, an enormous god, both visible at once.
A complete short work
Six volumes is the whole of it: no decades-long run, no filler arcs. Rayearth is one of the few famous manga of its era that a collector can still shelve entire, first editions and all, in a single row.