When did Vagabond start in Morning magazine?
September 3, 1998, in Weekly Morning No.40.
Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond debuted in Kodansha's Weekly Morning No.40 of 1998, the issue dated to September 3, with a 42-page first chapter titled "Shinmen Takezo." It opened not with a duel but with an aftermath: the boy who would become Miyamoto Musashi lying in the mud of Sekigahara, listening to the survivor-hunters pick over the field.
The placement mattered. Morning was and is a magazine for adult readers, home to quiet, ambitious serials, and it gave a former sports cartoonist room to make a slow, painterly, violent historical epic on a weekly schedule. The first collected volumes followed six months later, on March 23, 1999.
THE FIRST CHAPTER
"Shinmen Takezo," 42 pagesThe issue
Weekly Morning No.40 of 1998, on sale September 3. Morning is Kodansha's flagship seinen weekly, an adult magazine, which is why Vagabond could be the violent, philosophical work it is from page one.
The opening
Chapter 1 begins where the novel's legend ends its prologue: face down in the mud of Sekigahara, among the dead, a seventeen-year-old who came to make his name and nearly became a casualty statistic.
The length
At 42 pages the debut chapter is double a standard weekly installment, a statement of intent from both author and magazine.
The timing
Slam Dunk had ended in 1996. Inoue spent the interval on the shorter Buzzer Beater and on becoming, deliberately, a different kind of artist: Vagabond is the first fruit of that reinvention.