Bastard!!

• 1. Introduction

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  Bastard!! is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kazushi Hagiwara, and it is named after its own irreverence. The title alone signals what it contains: a dark wizard named Dark Schneider, a world built from heavy metal band names, and a fantasy universe designed to feel like the wildest possible fever dream of Dungeons and Dragons crossed with a concert setlist. Since its debut in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1988, it has put over 30 million copies into circulation, making it one of the publisher's best-selling series of all time. What made a manga with this particular flavor connect so widely? The answer has everything to do with one artist's obsessions, his unusual creative process, and the way he fused the music he loved into the bones of his fictional world.

• 2. From Devilman to Dark Schneider

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  Go Nagai's Devilman changed the direction of Kazushi Hagiwara's life. Reading it during his youth, alongside popular shonen manga magazines, Hagiwara decided he wanted to draw manga professionally. After leaving high school, he took an assistant position at Shueisha, working for Izumi Matsumoto on the Weekly Shonen Jump series Kimagure Orange Road. That job trained him on a demanding production schedule while he quietly developed one-shot stories on the side. In 1987, Shueisha ran an initiative to spotlight new artists. Hagiwara submitted a dark fantasy one-shot titled Wizard!! Bakuen no Seifukusha. It was selected, performed well in reader surveys, and earned him a full weekly serialization. He adapted the setting and characters from Wizard!! into a newly titled series, and Bastard!! began its run in Shonen Jump on the 14th of March, 1988. The influence of Devilman never left the project. Alongside it, role-playing video games like the Dragon Quest series and gamebooks from the Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone shaped the fantasy architecture of the world Hagiwara was building.

• 3. Metal in the Map

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  Hagiwara is an enthusiastic fan of heavy metal music, and he embedded that fandom directly into the geography and cast of Bastard!!. Characters, locations, and spells throughout the series carry the names of hard rock and heavy metal bands. Bon Jovi, Accept, Stryper, Metallica, Judas Priest, Whitesnake, Anthrax, Megadeth, Venom, Guns N' Roses, Black Sabbath, and Helloween all lend their names to the fictional world. The main city where much of the story takes place is called Metallicana. When Viz Media licensed the series for North America, the band-named locations created a licensing complication. The publisher took the Japanese transliterations of these names and altered them, then transliterated them back into English. Anthrax became Anthrasax, Iron Maiden became Aian Meide, and Metallicana was changed to Meta-Rikana. The same approach was taken by Pioneer for the OVA adaptation. This process scrambled the in-jokes but preserved the recognizable sonic echo for readers who knew the source material.

• 4. Studio, Pages, Process

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  Hagiwara built his creative process around a single integrated workflow, handling scriptwriting, storyboarding, and artwork without separating them into distinct phases. He estimated splitting his time equally between illustrations and dialogue, and at his most productive he completed up to three pages per day. The earliest chapters, covering the first few tankōbon volumes, were produced on a demanding weekly schedule without assistants. He concluded that while a faster pace was possible, the perceived quality of the artwork would suffer under strict deadlines. He eventually built a team of up to six assistants who handled backgrounds, inking, and screentone application. Beginning during his time as an assistant to Matsumoto, Hagiwara used extensive screentone to create shadow, shading, and dimensional effects, and he taught this technique to his team. After the series moved to a less frequent publication schedule, he took on more of the artwork directly rather than delegating it. He also referenced cosplay photographs and his personal figurine collection to achieve a more realistic visual aesthetic. He experimented with digital coloring but worked primarily with Pantone and Copic markers.

• 5. Influences on the Characters

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  Hagiwara drew on a circle of animators and character designers whose work he had studied closely. Primary influences on his character designs included Hiroyuki Kitatsumi, Tomonori Kogawa, and Mutsumi Inomata. Kogawa's distinctive cel art style had such an impact that Hagiwara spent years studying and replicating it. The character Princess Sheila was created directly because of his appreciation for Ciela, a character from Aura Battler Dunbine, a series on which Kogawa had worked. These relationships carried over into production. When the Bastard!! anime OVA was made by AIC, Kitatsumi contributed to the character designs. Onda illustrated the DVD covers for the adaptation. The six-episode OVA ran from the 25th of August, 1992, to the 25th of June, 1993, covering the story through the Four Lords of Havoc's battle against Abigail, which corresponds to volumes 6-7 of the manga. Video game designer and producer Daisuke Ishiwatari later cited the fantasy setting of Bastard!! as a major influence on his creation of Guilty Gear.

• 6. Publishing History

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  Bastard!! ran as a regular weekly series in Shonen Jump from March 1988 until the 21st of August, 1989. It then shifted to the Weekly Shonen Jump Specials quarterly magazine on an irregular schedule, returned to Shonen Jump itself on an irregular monthly basis from 1997 to 2000, and was transferred on the 19th of December, 2000, to the seinen magazine Ultra Jump. The latest chapter published in Ultra Jump appeared on the 19th of May, 2010. Twenty-seven tankōbon volumes had been released as of March 2012. Shueisha also released a kanzenban-like Complete Edition, which in its first volume updated Hagiwara's art style and improved backgrounds and screentones, while the second volume was fully redrawn and included material not in the original release. A nine-volume bunkoban edition followed in 2014, running from May to September. In North America, Viz Media announced the license in July 2001 and published the first five volumes in a left-to-right edition before switching to the original right-to-left format. Publication ended after volume 19 in September 2009. A 51-page reboot of the original pilot chapter, illustrated by Tatsuya Shihara, appeared in Ultra Jump on the 29th of July, 2023.

• 7. Animation and Beyond

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  Pioneer Entertainment brought the OVA to North America on three VHS tapes with an English dub between the 28th of August and the 8th of December, 1998, and re-released it on DVD on the 5th of June, 2001. The next adaptation came decades later. Liden Films announced an original net animation on the 3rd of February, 2022. The 24-episode first season was directed by Takaharu Ozaki, with scripts by Yōsuke Kuroda, character designs by Sayaka Ono, and music by Yasuharu Takanashi. The first 13 episodes premiered on Netflix worldwide on the 30th of June, 2022; the remaining 11 followed on the 15th of September. The opening theme was "Bloody Power Fame" by Coldrain, and the ending theme was "Blessless" by Tielle. A televised broadcast on BS11 began in Japan on the 11th of January, 2023. A second season of 15 episodes premiered on Netflix on the 31st of July, 2023, opened its first three episodes as a 90-minute special on BS11 on the 3rd of January, 2024, and used a new opening theme, "New Dawn" by Coldrain. Sentai Filmworks released the first season on Blu-ray in North America on the 21st of January, 2025.