What happened to Bastard!! in English?
Viz Media announced the license in July 2001, launching with comic-format issues before the collected volumes began in August 2002. The English edition is based on Japan’s Complete Edition, so its early art is Hagiwara’s redrawn version. Viz first published volumes 1 to 5 in a left-to-right (flopped/mirrored) edition, the era’s standard practice, then reversed course with the market: from November 2003 the series was republished right-to-left in the original orientation, and later volumes appeared only that way.
Publication slowed with the Japanese schedule and stopped after volume 19 in September 2009. Volume 20 was solicited for January 2010 and cancelled; volumes 20 to 27 have never had an official English release. The edition’s most famous quirk is linguistic: the metal names, already transliterated into Japanese, were re-rendered approximately on the way back, so Anthrax’s god became Anthrasax, Iron Maiden’s city became Aian Meide, and Metallicana became Meta-Rikana. English readers thus own a dialect of Bastard!! that exists nowhere else. The 1992 OVA, meanwhile, reached North America through Pioneer (VHS 1998, DVD 2001), and the Netflix series’ home-video rights went to Sentai Filmworks, whose Blu-ray set appeared in January 2025.
