The History of Fairy Tail
Eleven years, 545 chapters, not one week missed.
Fairy Tail ran in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine from August 2, 2006 to July 26, 2017: 545 chapters collected into 63 volumes, following the wizard guild of Magnolia Town and its fire Dragon Slayer, Natsu Dragneel. Its creator, Hiro Mashima, wanted the opposite of his previous series: where Rave Master had left him feeling the story was sentimental and sad, this one was built, in his words, to have a lot of fun, inspired by sitting in bars with his friends.
The series became a franchise of unusual breadth: a 328-episode television anime, two films, eight spin-off manga series, a sequel still running, and a shelf of games. But the spine of it is the magazine run itself, eleven years long and famously uninterrupted.
THE SHAPE OF THE RUN
2006 to todayThe pilot, 2002
Four years before the series, Mashima drew a one-shot called Fairy Tale for Magazine Fresh (September 3, 2002). The serialized version rebuilt the idea around a guild of wizards taking jobs together, and the title's spelling changed with it.
Launch, 2006
Fairy Tail began in Weekly Shōnen Magazine on August 2, 2006. The first collected volume followed on December 15, 2006. Mashima had finished Rave Master the year before; this was his second long series in the same magazine.
The award, 2009
In 2009 the series won the Kodansha Manga Award for shōnen manga. By then it was one of the magazine's pillars: Oricon's yearly charts placed it fourth among all manga in both 2010 and 2011.
Eleven years, no hiatus
The final chapter ran on July 26, 2017. Comic Natalie's report on the ending led with the statistic the industry noticed: eleven years of weekly serialization completed without a single hiatus. Chapter 545 closed the story; the 63rd volume followed on November 17, 2017.
72 million copies
By February 2020 the manga had over 72 million copies in circulation, with more than 7.7 million sold in France alone by 2018. It remains one of the best-selling manga series ever published.
The story continued anyway
A year after the ending, the sequel Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest launched with Mashima storyboarding and Atsuo Ueda drawing. In 2026, for the twentieth anniversary, Mashima returned to draw the guild himself in the miniseries Fairy Tail Re:Fantasia.