What Awards Did Blade of the Immortal Win?

The two that matter most bookend the run: a newcomer prize before chapter one, and an Eisner once America caught up.

Blade of the Immortal has been decorated at every stage of its life. It began as a prize winner: the opening chapter took the Grand Prize of Kodansha's Afternoon Four Seasons Award in 1993, which is the reason the series exists. Four years later, in 1997, it won the Excellence Award at the first Japan Media Arts Festival, the Japanese government-backed festival's inaugural manga honours. In 2000 the English edition won the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material, the American industry's highest honour for a translated comic, at a time when manga barely appeared on its ballots.

Dark Horse's own billing for the series adds two consecutive British Eagle Awards, and the influence column may be the longest award of all: Masashi Kishimoto and Tatsuki Fujimoto, two of the defining manga artists of the generation after Samura, have both named Blade of the Immortal as an influence on their work.

Blade of the Immortal volume 15 Japanese cover, Afternoon KC — **VOLUME 15**Volume 15 of the Japanese tankobon, Afternoon KC. Samura painted all thirty covers himself, and they were never redesigned.

THE RECORD

Prize by prize

Afternoon Four Seasons Award, 1993

The Grand Prize for the debut chapter, awarded before the series began. Kodansha's newcomer prize functioned here as a commissioning decision: the winning one-shot became a nineteen-year serial.

Japan Media Arts Festival, 1997

Excellence Award at the festival's first edition. The series was four volumes old and already being treated as a work of national standing.

Eisner Award, 2000

Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material, for the Dark Horse edition: recognition not only of Samura but of the cut-and-paste English production documented elsewhere in this archive, which had made the work legible to American readers without mirroring a line of it.

The circulation figures

Five million copies in circulation by February 2017 and over 7.5 million by May 2019: slow numbers by blockbuster standards, and exactly the shape of a backlist classic, still growing six years after the final chapter.

The second Excellence Award, 2014

Samura himself repeated the Media Arts honour seventeen years later for Spring Breeze Snegurochka, a distinction few manga artists hold twice.

What Awards Did Blade of the Immortal Win?

THE RECORD

THE FIRST WORD