The Slayers manga, series by series
Ten manga lines across fourteen years, drawn by five different hands, and only one of them by the novels’ own artist.
Slayers in manga is a shelf of parallel tellings. The flagship adaptation, Super-Explosive Demon Story, retells the novels’ first arc; Knight of the Aqualord is an original story treated as a third continuity of its own; and the one-shot that started the manga line was drawn by Rui Araizumi himself. Most of the 1990s–2000s lines ran in Fujimi’s Dragon magazines, and Central Park Media published the core of them in English.
THE LINES
1995–2009Slayers · Medieval Mayhem (1995) · 1 volume
Story by Kanzaka, art by Rui Araizumi, in Dragon Magazine. An original story, reedited in 2001. CPM’s English edition: June 15, 1999.
Super-Explosive Demon Story (1995–2001) · 8 volumes
Shoko Yoshinaka adapts main novels 1–8 in Comic Dragon and Dragon Junior; volume 4 adapts the film Slayers Return instead. CPM published seven of the eight volumes in English (2002–2004); Madman handled Australia.
Slayers Special (2000–2001) · 4 volumes
Tommy Ohtsuka and Yoshimiro Kamada adapt the Special novels in Dragon Junior. CPM English: October 2002 to June 2003.
Slayers Premium (2002) · 1 volume
Ohtsuka adapts the short film. CPM English: July 5, 2005.
Knight of the Aqualord (2003–2005) · 6 volumes
Ohtsuka and Kamada again, an original storyline splitting off after the novels’ first arc, officially a third continuity beside the novels’ second arc and Try.
The Hourglass of Falces (2008) · 3 volumes
Shin Slayers: Falces no Sunadokei, art by Asashi. The revival-era manga, built around the ancient weapon Falces.
Slayers Legend (2008–2009) · 2 volumes
A compilation reprinting chapters from Araizumi’s Slayers and Yoshinaka’s Super-Explosive Demon Story.
Revolution (2008) · 1 volume · Evolution-R (2009) · 1 volume
Issei Hyōji adapts each revival season in Monthly Dragon Age, one volume apiece.
Light Magic (2008–2009) · 2 volumes
The outlier: written by Yoshijirō Muramatsu, art by Shin Sasaki, in Kadokawa Shoten’s Kerokero Ace. Slayers transplanted from a fantasy world into a technological one.