The History of Vagabond

Vagabond begins as a wager. Takehiko Inoue had ended Slam Dunk in 1996, at the height of its fame, and wanted, in his own framing, something more realistic and more basic: life and death, the human condition. He found it in Eiji Yoshikawa's 1935 novel Musashi, the beloved retelling of the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, and in the question the novel raised in him: what was this man like as a young brute, before the enlightenment everyone writes about?

Kodansha's Weekly Morning gave the experiment its home on September 3, 1998. What followed was one of the great careers in manga: 82 million copies in circulation, the medium's three great prizes, two art books, a museum exhibition of an unfinished comic, and a hiatus, begun May 21, 2015, that has now lasted a decade. The timeline below is the whole arc in nine beats.