An entire generation of American girls got their aesthetics permanently shaped by the Sailor Moon animated series. The anime, though, was based on a series of manga by Naoko Takeuchi–the apotheosis of the “magical girl” genre. And, while the English translations of Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon manga volumes were immensely popular in the U.S. between 1997 and 2005, they’ve been out of print here since their former American publisher Tokyopop’s license expired six years ago.
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That’s going to change this fall, when Kodansha USA–the American branch of Sailor Moon‘s original Japanese publisher–relaunches the manga series this September. Back in 2003, when a live-action Sailor Moon TV series appeared in Japan, Takeuchi resequenced the original eighteen volumes into twelve books following the main storyline and two more collecting various short stories; that’s the edition that Kodansha will be publishing.
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Before Sailor Moon, Takeuchi created a shorter series called Codename: Sailor V, whose concept was expanded into the “full cast of magical girls named after planets” premise of the better-known series. Kodansha will be publishing it alongside Sailor Moon–the first time it’s officially appeared in the U.S.
