The History of Blade of the Immortal

A prize-winning one-shot that ran for nineteen years.

Blade of the Immortal began as a single chapter. Hiroaki Samura's opening story, published in Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon on June 25, 1993, had just won the Grand Prize of the Afternoon Four Seasons Award, the magazine's newcomer prize. Afternoon turned it into a series, and the series refused to end quickly: it ran in the same magazine from December 1993 to December 25, 2012, 207 chapters collected in 30 tankobon volumes.

The story it tells is set in the mid-Tokugawa period and follows Manji, a swordsman who cannot die, hired as bodyguard by Rin Asano, a girl seeking the men who destroyed her family and her father's sword school. Samura has said his largest influence was the classic swordsman figure Tange Sazen, and that his aim was a new style of manga: in his words, do not obsess about the details, just look at the story. Readers did: by February 2017 the manga had five million copies in circulation, and by May 2019 over 7.5 million.

Blade of the Immortal volume 2 Japanese cover, Afternoon KC — **VOLUME 2**Volume 2 of the Japanese tankobon, Afternoon KC. Samura painted all thirty covers himself, and they were never redesigned.

THE RUN, IN FIVE OBJECTS

1993 to 2024

The one-shot, 1993

The debut chapter, titled Criminal in English editions, appeared in the August 1993 issue of Monthly Afternoon after winning the Four Seasons Grand Prize. Everything in the series grows out of its pages.

The first volume, 1994

Kodansha collected the opening chapters on September 22, 1994. The tankobon run then continued, volume by volume, for eighteen more years. See the gallery for the full shelf.

The novel, 2008

Junichi Ohsako's prose novel Legend of the Sword Demon, illustrated by Samura, appeared on July 18, 2008, the same summer as the first anime. Dark Horse Books published it in English in January 2010.

The final volume, 2013

Volume 30 closed the series on February 22, 2013, two months after the last chapter. The final chapter is titled simply Manji and Rin, and the cover is the quietest of the run.

The sequel, 2019 to 2024

Blade of the Immortal: Bakumatsu Arc moved the story to the end of the Tokugawa age. Written by Kenji Takigawa with Samura collaborating and drawn by Ryu Suenobu, it ran in Monthly Afternoon from May 2019 to May 2024 across ten volumes.

The complete edition, 2016 to 2017

Kodansha reissued the whole series as a 15-volume kanzenban between August 2016 and February 2017, halving the shelf while keeping Samura's covers in front of new readers.

WHY IT LASTED

The record

One magazine

Nineteen years in a single monthly magazine is the spine of the series. Monthly Afternoon is a seinen magazine, and the schedule gave Samura room for the long, quiet chapters between the duels.

One artist

Samura wrote and drew every chapter himself across the whole run, which is why the art can evolve from the early pencil work to the late painterly pages without ever changing hands.

Two audiences

The series was a Japanese institution and, unusually for its era, an English-language one at the same time: Dark Horse began publishing it in 1996, while the Japanese run still had sixteen years to go.

The History of Blade of the Immortal

THE RUN, IN FIVE OBJECTS

WHY IT LASTED

THE FIRST WORD