What Weekly Morning issues have Vagabond on the cover?

Sixteen documented cover features, 2008 to 2014.

Vagabond was never a quiet tenant of Weekly Morning. When a chapter landed, Kodansha's editors repeatedly gave Takehiko Inoue the whole cover, a full-bleed painting with the magazine's logo pushed around it. The sixteen covers below are the ones preserved in the Vagabond cover archives, each verified against the printed issue data: number, year, and the cover line the issue actually carried.

The set reads like a diary of the late serialization: the 2008 issue that announced Inoue's museum exhibition, the 2012 comeback cover after the eighteen-month silence, and the run of portraits from the manga's final active years. Read the footnote under the gallery before quoting the number sixteen anywhere. This census is honest about its edges.

THE DOCUMENTED COVERS

Weekly Morning · 2008 to 2014

Morning 2008 · No.25

The exhibition issue. The cover is Inoue's own hand, mid-stroke, drawing Musashi: the banner announces the unprecedented solo exhibition opening May 24, 2008, and the run toward volume 31.

Morning 2008 · No.35

Musashi in sulphur yellow behind a web of black cracks, one of the most graphic designs Morning ever ran.

Morning 2009 · No.40

A seated Musashi with both swords, painted in watercolor, under the line "toward a new frontier of the sword."

Morning 2009 · No.41

The two-sword swordsman in red and black, blade reversed in the rear hand, from the chapter run beside No.40.

Morning 2010 · No.9

The laughing Musashi. "This is the MANGA!!" Morning's editors let the grin carry the whole cover, Vagabond lettered across the bottom.

Morning 2012 · No.16

The return. "Serialization resumes!" After eighteen months away, Vagabond came back to Morning in March 2012 as a monthly series, and this crouching Musashi announced it.

Morning 2012 · No.25

The third chapter back, flagged on the cover itself. Musashi holds a flowering branch, the softest image of the comeback year.

Morning 2012 · No.29

A lead-color cover feature, Musashi's face against a summer-blue ground, painted for the issue's opening color pages.

Morning 2012 · No.30

Musashi in the bamboo grove, in profile, one of the great quiet covers of the late run.

Morning 2012 · No.39

"A rolling stone gathers no moss." The English proverb runs under the title on one of the largest Vagabond wordmarks Morning ever printed.

Morning 2012 · No.47

Musashi gripping his katana inches from the picture plane. The banner promises the newest volume, hot off the press.

Morning 2013 · No.4-5

The merged New Year issue. Matahachi takes the foreground for once, grinning, with Musashi behind him: the comic relief gets a cover.

Morning 2013 · No.12

"Fudofukutsu": unyielding, unbending. A scarred close-up that fills the entire cover.

Morning 2013 · No.42

Musashi in profile, head bowed over folded hands. The cover line reads "beyond the life I found."

Morning 2013 · No.46

The pink-logo cover: Musashi lunging, the most kinetic painting of the set.

Morning 2014 · No.7

An ink portrait and a levelled katana. The last Morning cover feature in this archive; the final chapters ran in 2014 and 2015.

THE HONEST FOOTNOTE

What this census is, and is not

These sixteen covers are the Vagabond cover features preserved in the fan-maintained Vagabond wiki's cover archive, and every one of them leads its issue: Inoue's painting is the cover, not a corner badge. They cluster between 2008 and 2014, the years when a Vagabond chapter was an event Morning put on the front of the magazine.

They are not the whole story. Vagabond ran in Morning from 1998, and the weekly-era covers of 1998 to 2007, when the series appeared almost every week, have never been comprehensively archived in public. Treat this page as a verified floor, not a ceiling: at least these sixteen, certainly more. When a seller dates a "Vagabond cover issue" outside this list, the claim may well be true. It is simply not one this page can vouch for yet.

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Japanese editions and magazine issues, photographed in detail on black velvet.

All 37 tankobon covers →

The exhibition the 2008 cover announced →

What Weekly Morning issues have Vagabond on the cover?

THE DOCUMENTED COVERS

THE HONEST FOOTNOTE

THE FIRST WORD