What is the Kingdom Hearts manga?
The Kingdom Hearts manga is the work of Shiro Amano (born January 4, 1976), who came to the series from his Legend of Mana adaptation and has drawn its paper version in Square Enix’s Monthly Shōnen Gangan since 2003. The first tankōbon appeared in October 2003, and the line grew game by game: Kingdom Hearts in four volumes, Chain of Memories in two, Kingdom Hearts II in ten, 358/2 Days in five, and Kingdom Hearts III, begun April 29, 2019, in four, twenty-five Japanese volumes in all. Like the games, the first series even received a “Final Mix”: a three-volume re-release in early 2007.
The Kingdom Hearts II manga is the line’s epic and its oddity. Serialized from May 2006, it paused after its fifth volume in 2009 while Amano drew the entire 358/2 Days manga, resumed in October 2012, and only concluded in May 2015, a nine-year run for one game’s story, closing with a special chapter, “The Meaning of the Paopu Fruit.” Amano announced in 2015 that Kingdom Hearts II would be his last adaptation, then returned for Kingdom Hearts III anyway. His telling is famously looser than the games: gag timing, compressed battles, and small invented scenes that fans treat as the saga’s official comic relief.
The English edition has died twice. Tokyopop published the first series from October 2005 and two volumes of Kingdom Hearts II before losing the license and closing its North American operation in 2011. Yen Press rescued the line in 2013, reissuing everything as omnibuses (Kingdom Hearts II across four large volumes, 2013 to 2017) and publishing Amano’s series artbook, Shiro Amano: The Artwork of Kingdom Hearts, in English. Yen’s Disney license then expired in 2023, pausing English publication again, with Panini Comics taking up the manga in some markets from 2024.
