The history of Claymore
A comedy artist's thirteen-year dark epic, told in three magazines.
Before Claymore there was a gag manga about a boy whose terrifying face hid a gentle heart. Norihiro Yagi, born in Okinawa in 1968, spent the 1990s as a comedy artist in Shueisha's Monthly Shonen Jump. Then, in the same magazine, he started a medieval monster-hunting epic and drew it, month after month, for thirteen years.
BEFORE CLAYMORE
Yagi at Shueisha, 1990 to 2000The prize
Yagi's debut, UNDEADMAN, won the 32nd Akatsuka Award and appeared in Monthly Shonen Jump in 1990. The award is Shueisha's long-running prize for new comedy talent, which tells you what kind of artist the magazine thought it was hiring.
The comedy decade
His first series, Angel Densetsu, ran in Monthly Shonen Jump from 1992 to 2000: a slapstick school comedy built on one joke, a sweet boy everyone mistakes for a delinquent. It made his name and fixed his reputation as a humorist.
The turn
For his next series Yagi changed everything except the magazine: medieval Europe, an all-female warrior order, monsters that wear human faces. Claymore debuted in Monthly Shonen Jump's July 2001 issue, released 6 June 2001.
THE RUN
2001 to 2014 · 155 chapters · 27 volumesThree magazines
Claymore outlived its first home. Monthly Shonen Jump folded in June 2007; after four special chapters in Weekly Shonen Jump, the series settled into the new Jump Square that November and ran there to its planned end.
The finale
The last chapter appeared in Jump Square on 4 October 2014, closing the story at 155 chapters. The twenty-seventh and final volume followed on 4 December 2014. Claymore is a finished work, complete in a way its famous contemporaries often are not.
The other forms
A 26-episode anime by Madhouse aired in 2007, faithful for most of its run before inventing its own ending. One video game followed in 2009. In March 2025 a live-action television series was announced in Hollywood, the story's third screen life.