What is Hellsing: The Dawn?
A six-chapter prequel set in Warsaw in 1944, and the most unfinished thing Hirano ever signed.
Hellsing: The Dawn follows a fourteen-year-old Walter C. Dornez and Alucard, who takes the form of a young girl for the mission, into Nazi-controlled Poland in September 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, to strike at the wartime project that becomes Millennium. Hirano published six chapters between 2002 and 2006. There is no seventh.
A PREQUEL TWICE ORPHANED
The magazines died under it2002 · The special issues
The Dawn begins in Young King OURs Zokan, the magazine’s special-edition line, in March 2002. The main series is mid-run and selling; the prequel is a side project from the start.
2003 · First closure
The Zokan line is discontinued in 2003. The Dawn pauses with its host magazine.
2005 to 2006 · Revival and second closure
The story resumes in the successor magazine, Young King OURs Plus, in 2005. That magazine also folds, in 2006, and the prequel stops for good after six chapters. Hirano never returned to it.
Never a book
The Dawn has never been collected into a tankobon of its own, in Japanese or in English. The chapters live in the magazine issues, and the story’s only other official form is animated.
THE DAWN ON SCREEN
Three short specialsBundled with the end of Ultimate
Each limited edition of the last three Ultimate OVAs, VIII, IX, and X, carried a short Dawn episode, released between July 2011 and December 2012, animated by Graphinica at six to nine minutes each.
Read it after
Although it is a prequel, The Dawn assumes a reader who already knows Walter, Alucard, and Millennium from the main series. It is best met after volume 7 of the manga, or after the whole story.