Viz and Takahashi: a thirty-year history

Viz was present at the creation of the American manga market, and Takahashi was its cornerstone author. The company launched Urusei Yatsura in 1989, dropped it, revived it inside Animerica magazine, and let it lapse unfinished in the 1990s. Ranma ½ followed in 1992 and ran, in one format or another, for over thirteen years, becoming Viz’s longest-running manga of its era. Inuyasha began in 1997 and completed in 2011.

The compromises of those years are the story: artwork flipped and mirrored to read left-to-right, chapters dropped, formats that changed shape mid-run. The modern Viz era repaired all of it with complete, unflipped omnibus editions of all three series, Inuyasha’s VIZBIG line (2009–14), Ranma ½’s 2-in-1 books (2014–17) and Urusei Yatsura at last complete (2019–23). Each series’ own page in this hub documents its editions in full.