What was Attack on Titan’s 2006 one-shot?

The whole idea, drawn once, three years early.

In 2006, Isayama submitted a short version of Attack on Titan to Kodansha’s Magazine Grand Prix (MGP), the publisher’s open talent contest. It took the Fine Work award, the contest’s honourable-mention tier, and it is the earliest form of the story: Titans, walls, and a soldier with blades, compressed into a single self-contained short.

The one-shot is not chapter 1 in rough form. It is a separate, shorter telling, drawn in Isayama’s rawest published style, by a twenty-year-old who had not yet held a serialization. When the anime arrived, Kodansha brought it back: the prototype was included as a bonus with the first Blu-ray volume of the television series in 2013, which is how most readers have seen it. Series history usually starts in 2009; the object itself starts here.

Attack on Titan volume 0 booklet shown with the Season 1 Blu-ray box — **VOLUME 0**The 2006 one-shot was reprinted as this Volume 0 booklet, bundled with the Season 1 Blu-ray box.

WHY IT MATTERS TO COLLECTORS

Paper trail

A pre-series artifact

Like Berserk’s 1988 prototype on this site’s shelves, the one-shot separates the idea from the institution that later sold it. It predates Bessatsu, the anime, and the logo treatment every later cover wears.

Where it survives

The 2006 magazine printing is the original appearance; the widely circulated version is the anime Blu-ray bonus reprint. Any copy offered for sale should be one of those two, and the description should say which.

What was Attack on Titan’s 2006 one-shot?

WHY IT MATTERS TO COLLECTORS

THE FIRST WORD