Who illustrated the Vampire Hunter D novels?

Hideyuki Kikuchi published the first Vampire Hunter D novel in 1983, and its illustrator was the newly freelance Yoshitaka Amano. He has painted the covers and interior art ever since, across a series that now runs to more than forty volumes: the longest running of all his book partnerships, and still active.

The D on those covers is Amano's invention. Amano has recalled that Kikuchi's own image of the hunter leaned toward a spaghetti western gunman; Amano drew instead a pale, androgynous aristocrat in a wide-brimmed hat and a long black cloak, hair falling past his shoulders. Readers, and eventually the films, kept Amano's version. As early as a 1987 interview, he was being told that readers pictured D as a blend of Moorcock's Elric and Corum, two more of his cover subjects.

Because the art is the series' public face, the Library's Vampire Hunter D shelf treats the books as Amano objects as much as Kikuchi novels. Its own pages cover what Amano did for the series in detail, how to tell a first printing, and a gallery of the covers themselves; this hub is the artist's-eye view of the same shelf.