About the Manga
MAO began publication in May of 2019 in Shonen Sunday 2019 Volume 23. There was an unusually lengthy break between the conclusion of Kyokai no Rinne in December 2017 and the beginning of MAO which saw Takahashi take her longest vacation from manga with no serial published at all during 2018.
| Weekly Serializations in Shonen Sunday (少年サンデー) |
When Takahashi returned to regular weekly publication it was among new faces and new series such as Yofukashi no Uta by Kotayama and Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle by Kagiji Kumanomata, old faces debuting new works such as Kenjiro Hata's Fly Me to the Moon and Soubotei Kowasubeshi by Kazuhiro Fujita and long, long running series such as Detective Conan by Gosho Aoyama (which had been running in Shonen Sunday since 1994, when Takahashi was still writing Ranma 1/2 prior to both Inuyasha and Kyokai no Rinne). Other popular series began during MAO's serialization such as Frieren: Beyond Journey's End by Kanehito Yamada. Also Takashi Shiina began publishing his adaptation of Yashahime the Inuyasha spin-off in Shonen Sunday S at this time.
This is also the one of the only place to find the original color illustrations that Takahashi created for the series. Because the magazines are not meant to be kept these color illustrations have been particularly challenging to find. Each week a different artist is commissioned to do the cover and the first few pages which are done in color. With the exception of artbooks, these color pages are usually never reprinted. MAO also has seen the use of some computer coloring as well. In previous years Takahashi had proclaimed she did not own a computer and she has never mentioned if she learned to use one or has one of her assistants do the computer-based coloring. Much of the color artwork however is still in watercolor. |
| Tankobon (単行本) |
After the chapters have been published in Shonen Sunday they are collected into small books called tankobon. A tankoban is a collection of 10 chapters and are published every 3 to 4 months. All color pages that were initially published in Shonen Sunday are converted to gray scale in the tankobans though some color title page illustrations are used on the inside of the dust jacket.
Shonen Sunday tankobon are all printed in the Japanese B6 format (12.8 cm × 18.2 cm or 5.04 in × 7.17 in). |
| Foreign Editions |
Rumiko Takahashi is a rare example of an artist that has had every serial she has written brought out in English through official translations. She has been the mainstay author of Viz since their inception in the late 1980s and MAO has continued that trend. The first volume was brought out in English on September 14, 2021 and a fairly consistent pace has been kept ensuring that the English translation does not lag too far behind the Japanese release. A few months earlier the Spanish edition of MAO was also released. On May 9, 2023 Viz suddenly announced that many titles including MAO would be simultaneously published digitally for free on the same day as their Japanese release. The first chapter of MAO to be released this way would be chapter 186.
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