What is Crossfire?
A three-chapter Iscariot side story that ended up inside the first three Hellsing volumes, where most readers meet it without knowing its name.
Crossfire follows Heinkel Wolfe and Yumie Takagi, two agents of the Vatican’s Iscariot organization, through three short missions. Kohta Hirano drew it for Comic Master, Hobby Japan’s magazine, and dropped it as a standalone work. It survived because the early Hellsing books needed it.
WHY IT LIVES INSIDE HELLSING
A page-count rescueThe short volumes
The first three Hellsing tankobon ran to unexpectedly low page counts. To fill them out, Shonengahosha republished one Crossfire chapter in each of volumes 1, 2, and 3 as an extra. That is why an Iscariot story sits inside the Hellsing agency’s own books.
The cast
Heinkel, the gunner, and Yumie, the swordswoman, call themselves earthly agents of divine punishment. Alexander Anderson and Enrico Maxwell, both later central to Hellsing, cameo in their own organization’s story first.
The tone
Three chapters, three different opponents, and the same deadpan Hirano mixture of the sacred and the absurd. It is a sketch of Iscariot’s world before the main series gives the organization its war.
READING CROSSFIRE TODAY
Where it sits in each editionJapanese volumes
The three chapters are in the Japanese tankobon exactly as placed in the 1990s: one at the back of each of volumes 1 to 3.
Dark Horse paperbacks
The English single volumes keep the same placement, so English readers of volumes 1 to 3 have owned Crossfire all along, listed among each book’s contents.
The Deluxe Edition
Dark Horse’s third Deluxe hardcover gathers all three Crossfire chapters together in its bonus section, alongside the colour gallery and the extras from the whole run.
On disc
A Crossfire drama CD accompanied the Japanese releases of Hellsing Ultimate volumes VI and VII, the side story’s only performed version.