From the Library: covers, censuses, and editions, documented. Browse the Library →
SOJ Vagabond · The Exhibition
← Back to the Library

What was Takehiko Inoue's The LAST Manga Exhibition?

A museum show whose centerpiece was a new final chapter of Vagabond, painted for the walls of the Ueno Royal Museum in 2008.

In the early summer of 2008, the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo hosted Inoue Takehiko: The LAST Manga Exhibition, and it inverted what a manga exhibition usually is. Instead of displaying the comic, Inoue extended it: an original concluding chapter of Vagabond, the old Musashi at the end of the road, drawn and painted at mural scale across the museum's rooms, among more than a hundred works.

Morning announced it the way magazines announce everything, on a cover: the 2008 No.25 issue, elsewhere in this archive, shows Inoue's hand in the act of drawing Musashi, with the exhibition banner beneath. The show sold out daily, toured in the years after, and left behind two catalogues that are now the only complete record of the largest Vagabond art ever made.

THE SHOW

Ueno Royal Museum · Summer 2008
The premise
A manga exhibition that is itself manga: Inoue drew and painted an original final chapter of Vagabond for the walls, an elderly Musashi laying the sword down, shown as a walk-through sequence of more than one hundred works.
The scale
The paintings were not framed pages but murals, watercolor at building size, made for the museum's rooms. The tankobon covers had always been paintings; the exhibition simply gave them walls to match.
The demand
Tickets sold out day after day. Inoue publicly regretted that so many who queued could not get in, one reason the complete catalogue was produced.
The catalogues
Two books preserve it: INOUENO Mikazuki, on the making of the show, and INOUENO Mangetsu, reproducing every exhibited work, with English translations of the panels. Both were sold only in connection with the exhibition.
The name
"Last" is Inoue's wager, not a retirement notice: he titled it as if a manga artist gets one such show in a life, and made it while the manga itself was still running.
The afterlife
The exhibition's final chapter circulates among readers as a kind of ending, the only one Vagabond has. It is not the serialization's ending, and Inoue has never presented it as one. It is an epilogue painted nine years before the manga stopped.
The art books: Sumi and Water →
The Morning issue that announced it →
MORE FROM THE VAGABOND ARCHIVE →
One shelf of the Library. Browse them all →

THE FIRST WORD

New pages and new pieces, first.