What is Wizard!!, the Bastard!! pilot?
In 1987 Shueisha ran an initiative to showcase new artists in Weekly Shonen Jump, and Hagiwara’s entry was a dark fantasy one-shot titled Wizard!! Bakuen no Seifukusha (“Wizard!! Conqueror of Explosive Flames”). It performed strongly in the reader surveys, the currency that decides everything at Jump, and earned a weekly serialization. Rather than continue the one-shot directly, Hagiwara rebuilt its sword-and-sorcery setting and character types into a new, bigger series: Bastard!!, which debuted the following March. The pilot’s fingerprints (a flame-wielding wizard, an ancient evil, a world already half-ruined) are all over the finished work.
The pilot has had a second life. In 2023, as part of the series’ thirty-fifth anniversary period, artist Tatsuya Shihara drew a full 51-page remake of Wizard!!, published in Ultra Jump on July 29, 2023: the apprentice piece, redrawn by another hand, in the magazine the series now calls home. Few pilots get that honor; fewer still are still technically prequels to an unfinished series.
