Fans of Yasuhiro Nightow's Trigun series are having a good couple of years. First the gorgeous Trigun Stampede anime came out in 2023, re-telling the story for the first time since 1998. Full disclosure: I wasn't familiar with Trigun at all until my wife suggested we watch Trigun Stampede on Crunchyroll. I loved it and recommend it to anyone who's more into animation than the written word. Then Dark Horse Comics announced that they were collecting both the original Trigun series and its follow-up Trigun Maximum into a series of six ultra-deluxe faux-leather hardcovers. It's a good time to get into Trigun.
If you're like me and didn't know anything about the main character of Vash the Stampede until recently, it's a pretty wild story. Vash, a pacifist gunslinger with a $60 billion dollar bounty on his head, travels around the galaxy avoiding bounty hunters. Wherever he goes, trouble and destruction follow, as well as two insurance investigators, Meryl and Milly, who act as the audience to the carnage. Think big action, big guns, big damage.
The new Dark Horse deluxe editions look to be the classiest things I own now. They're larger than your everyday manga, closer in size to the Monthly Shōnen Captain issues that ran the original Trigun series. The oversize nature is probably the #1 reason to buy these editions rather than tracking down cheaper floppy copies; the art is the star of Trigun.
Yasuhiro Nightow tells stories visually rather than with excess dialogue, so full double-page spreads or panels that run from the top of the page to the bottom look absolutely sick (in a good way, mind you). An explosion that would make you say, "Wow!" when reproduced at 1/3 the size of how it was initially presented now elicits a "HOLY SHIIIIIIIT", the same way as if you were watching it on a movie screen.
The new presentation makes these volumes undeniable shelf candy. Done up in red faux-leather, with gold embossed type and cloth bookmarks, the design is scrumptious. I don't use that word lightly — these books dress to impress, and as more volumes are released, I expect them to maintain the high standard. The volumes contain both black and white and color galleries of pin-up work, as well as Yasuhiro's comical insert stories that appeared at the end of the earlier collected volumes. Hell, even the paper quality is superb.
As this series intends to collect all of Trigun, there are bonus stories included, like Trigun Pilot and Day In Day Out. If there's anything missing, it's contextual bonus material, which I know is not a prerequisite to anything in this day and age. Other deluxe collections like the recent series of Urusei Yatsura by Rumiko Takahashi include supplementary essays that would have really been a nice addition to deluxe editions like these. But really, it's unfair of me to imagine a bonus feature and complain when a book doesn't have it. These books sing well enough on their own.
Trigun originally ran in Monthly Shōnen Captain until the magazine went under in 1997. Young King OURs picked it up and kept it going for another ten years under the name Trigun Maximum. Dark Horse is collecting the entire series, with the first, unnumbered volume batching volumes 1 and 2 of the original Trigun in 700 pages. Trigun Maximum will be released over a series of five volumes, with the third coming out on December 10th, 2024.
If you're searching for the original issues of Monthly Shōnen Captain where Trigun first appeared, be warned: using that exact search term on eBay brings up a lot of the gay porn mag "Black Inches" for some reason. Interesting reading, I'm sure, but it has nothing to do with Vash the Stampede and friends.
RATINGS
Craft: 5/5
Storyline: 5/5
Ability to stop a knife thrown by a bounty hunter: 4/5
