The history of Bastard!!
Bastard!!, Ankoku no Hakaishin (“The Dark God of Destruction”) is Kazushi Hagiwara’s sword-and-sorcery epic: four centuries after a demon destroyed the modern world, the wizard Dark Schneider is woken inside the body of a teenage boy and asked to save the kingdoms he once tried to conquer. It debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump on March 14, 1988, and became one of the magazine’s defining dark fantasies, with over 30 million copies in circulation.
Its publishing life is the unusual part. Bastard!! ran weekly for less than two years before its schedule began a decades-long loosening: quarterly specials, an irregular return to Jump, then a move to the seinen magazine Ultra Jump in 2000. The most recent chapter appeared in May 2010. The series has never been cancelled and never concluded; it simply moves at its author’s pace, and its audience has stayed. The full rhythm is told on the slowdown page.
