What is Tista, Tatsuya Endo's first series?

Tista was Tatsuya Endo's first serialization, running in Shueisha's Jump Square from the December 2007 issue to 2008 and collected in two tankobon volumes. Its heroine, Tista Lone, is a university art student in New York by day and, by night, the sniper assassin called Sister Militia, killing criminals on the orders of a clandestine religious group. The series is an action thriller about faith, guilt and the psychological cost of the double life.

Nearly everything about it is the negative image of Spy x Family. Where the later series hides an assassin inside a warm family comedy, Tista puts the assassin at the center and lets the darkness stay dark. Editor Shihei Lin, who began his decade-long partnership with Endo on this title, later recalled that Tista was packed with Endo's aesthetic but painful to storyboard, and neither the magazine record nor Endo has ever given a tidy reason for its short run. This page prints the dates and the counts, not a cancellation story.

For years Tista was the hardest Endo book to read in English. That changed in the 2020s: Viz Media has since published both of Endo's Jump Square serializations in English, with Blade of the Moon Princess beginning in September 2023 and Tista following, and Viz's 2025 collection Four Lives Remain gathered his early one-shots. The dark apprentice work is now shelf-available next to the hit.