Who illustrated the Guin Saga novels?

Kaoru Kurimoto's Guin Saga has run since September 1979 and reached 130 volumes before her death in 2009, a record-breaking span for a single author's novel series. No one artist could have painted all of it, and four did, in relay.

Naoyuki Kato painted the covers and interior art for the first nineteen volumes, in a heroic style openly indebted to Frank Frazetta. Amano took over with volume 20 in 1984 and stayed until volume 57 in 1997. He has said that Kato's Guin work strongly influenced his own, and admitted that he had not read the saga at all before being asked to illustrate it. Jun Suemi followed through volume 87, and Shinobu Tanno, whose style closely follows Suemi's, has drawn the series from volume 88.

For English readers there is a gap in the shelf. Vertical published the first five volumes in English in 2007 and 2008, all from the Kato years, and never continued. Amano's thirteen years of Guin exist only in the Japanese Hayakawa editions, which is why collectors meet his Guin as imported paperbacks: painted covers, interior plates, and no translation at all.