The Seven Deadly Sins (manga)

• 1. Twenty Pilot Drafts

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  The Seven Deadly Sins, the Japanese manga by Nakaba Suzuki, began with a pilot chapter that its author drew more than twenty times. One discarded manuscript, titled Chapter X, reached English readers in 2015 on the website of Kodansha USA. Behind that pile of drafts sits a story about knights who stand for the seven deadly sins, set in a world that resembles the European Middle Ages. Why did a fantasy that its creator once could not get past his own editors become a hit? How does one artist, working with pen and paper and no assistants, keep a weekly series going? And how did a single manga spread into anime, films, games and the stage?

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• 2. A Rejected Idea

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  Ever since becoming a manga artist, Nakaba Suzuki wanted to write a fantasy story with King Arthur as its motif. The editorial department kept turning the idea down. By his own account, "I couldn't draw the characters and it was always rejected". So he turned to modern manga stories as a way to practice, and eventually lost interest in fantasy altogether.

  The way back came from his editor, who read one of his earlier one-shots and suggested he return to the idea. Looking back, Suzuki said, "In that sense, it's a very emotional thing. I think if I had drawn it when I was younger, it wouldn't have turned out like this."

  The Arthurian debt is mostly in the names. Suzuki borrowed character names from tales about King Arthur, yet the personalities and the story came from his own ideas. The pilot one-shot appeared in Weekly Shōnen Magazine on the 22nd of November 2011. The full series began on the 10th of October 2012, and Suzuki planned very little of it in advance.

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• 3. Britannia Betrayed

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  Ten years before the story opens, the Seven Deadly Sins, a band of knights in the land of Britannia, have disbanded. The reason is a frame-up. The group was accused of plotting a coup against the Liones Kingdom. The Holy Knights then sequestered the Sins and took control of Liones in the wake of a rebellion that the Holy Knights had organized themselves.

  Elizabeth Liones, the kingdom's third princess, sets the plot moving when she finds Meliodas, the leader of the Sins. Together they set out to track down his old comrades, clear the group's names and free Liones from the Holy Knights.

  The Holy Knights, it turns out, were themselves manipulated. A demon named Fraudrin had steered them into unsealing the Demon Race from the prison that held it. Suzuki chose the size of the force opposing the Sins on purpose, for reasons tied to unpredictability.

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• 4. Designing the Cast

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  The one thing Nakaba Suzuki fixed from the start was the relationship between Meliodas and Elizabeth. Everything else he invented week by week, so that readers could never guess ahead. He also played with expectations in the first chapter, which shows wanted posters of the knights. Some members look very different from their posters. Others match theirs but turn out to have "horrible" personalities.

  Meliodas gave Suzuki the most trouble. The protagonist was meant to be a "child", yet the character is actually an adult. The hardest part was the hair. Suzuki settled on "fluffy" hair like a boy from a foreign country, something he had never drawn before. In the pilot chapter Meliodas had long, straight hair, which the author judged not as cute.

  Ban and King show how Suzuki handled friendship inside the group. Ban is Meliodas' best friend. King is only a teammate, and the two do not talk. All seven knights have relationships with this kind of subtle difference, which the author called realistically human.

  The Ten Commandments came from a worry about convenience. Suzuki felt that seven enemies fighting the seven heroes one-on-one would be too neat. With ten, one character could fail and another could defeat many alone. One character, Escanor, ended up "too strong", Suzuki admitted.

  The ending was settled early. Because the series is the story of Meliodas and Elizabeth, Suzuki planned a happy ending from the very beginning. He said, "I didn't want to make it an ending that left people feeling uneasy. … I want to draw things that make people feel good when they read them." Every one of these characters was drawn by hand, and by Suzuki alone.

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• 5. Working Alone

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  Suzuki draws his manuscripts with pen and paper, and he says that anything else does not feel like drawing manga. The tools carry a risk. He noted that the tones and Copic markers he uses are being discontinued one after another.

  He also works without assistants, which he links to his contrary personality. The habit dates to the start of his career, when an editor told him he could not manage without one. Suzuki wanted to prove the editor wrong. Working alone brings a perk he mentions: he can take breaks to play games and to drink alcohol while he works.

  His love of physical books shaped publishing as well. He asked that digital editions of the tankōbon appear one month after the print version. The 41 collected volumes began appearing on the 15th of February 2013, and the first English volume from Kodansha USA followed in March 2014.

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• 6. Crossovers and Spin-offs

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  On the 19th of October 2013, a special issue of Weekly Shōnen Magazine carried a small crossover between The Seven Deadly Sins and Hiro Mashima's Fairy Tail. Each artist drew a four-panel yonkoma of the other's series. A full crossover chapter followed in the magazine's combined 4/5 issue of 2014, released on the 25th of December 2013.

  Suzuki wrote several short pieces himself. A Dangerous Mission ran in the shōjo magazine Nakayoshi, released on the 3rd of October 2014. A comedic one-shot showing how Meliodas and Hawk first met ran in the issue of Magazine Special dated the 20th of October 2014. From the 24th of February to the 10th of May 2015, two more spin-offs appeared on the Manga Box app. One covered the younger years of Hendrickson and Dreyfus. The other followed Gilthunder after the Vaizel Fight Festival arc. For screenings of the film Prisoners of the Sky, Suzuki also created an original 40-page manga.

  Other artists reimagined the cast. Juichi Yamaki pictured the characters as high school students in a comedy that ran in Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine from the 9th of August 2014 to the 8th of October 2016. Chiemi Sakamoto's comedy for Aria showed them as actors in a live-action TV show. Masataka Ono's yonkoma depicted King as an aspiring manga artist. Yō Kokukuji adapted Mamoru Iwasa's novel The Seven Deadly Sins: Seven Days, showing in more detail how Ban and Elaine met.

  The main series ended on the 25th of March 2020. A one-shot about Ban's son appeared on the 5th of August 2020, and in January 2021 Suzuki began Four Knights of the Apocalypse as a sequel.

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• 7. Screen and Stage

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  In April 2014, the 20th issue of Weekly Shōnen Magazine announced an anime adaptation. A-1 Pictures produced it, with Tensai Okamura directing, Shōtarō Suga writing, Keigo Sasaki designing the characters and Hiroyuki Sawano composing the music. The first series ran for 24 episodes, from the 5th of October 2014 to the 29th of March 2015, on MBS, TBS and other JNN stations.

  The promised second series arrived in a different form. Announced for 2016, it became a four-episode special titled Signs of Holy War, an original story by Suzuki that aired from the 28th of August to the 18th of September 2016. Revival of The Commandments, the third season, followed with 24 episodes from the 13th of January to the 30th of June 2018. Jōji Furuta and Takao Yoshioka replaced Okamura and Suga as director and series composer.

  For the fourth season the production moved to Studio Deen. Imperial Wrath of The Gods ran for 24 episodes from the 9th of October 2019 to the 25th of March 2020. The fifth season, Dragon's Judgement, was slated for October 2020 but was delayed to January 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It aired for 24 episodes from the 13th of January to the 23rd of June 2021.

  Netflix licensed the series for English streaming in 2015, as its second exclusive anime after Knights of Sidonia. All 24 episodes of the first season arrived on the 1st of November 2015, in subtitled and English dub formats.

  Three films followed. Prisoners of the Sky premiered in Japanese theaters on the 18th of August 2018, based on an original story by Suzuki. Cursed by Light premiered on the 2nd of July 2021, directed by Takayuki Hamana at Studio Deen. Grudge of Edinburgh, a two-part Netflix film from Alfred Imageworks and Marvy Jack, centers on Meliodas' son, Tristan Liones. Its first part was released on the 20th of December 2022, with the second part set for August 2023.

  The Seven Deadly Sins The Stage was performed in August 2018. A second stage play, planned for June 2020, was cancelled because of the pandemic. Bandai Namco released a game for the Nintendo 3DS on the 11th of February 2015, and Netmarble's mobile game reached Android and iOS worldwide on the 3rd of March 2020. Netmarble's open-world game The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin was postponed until the 16th of March 2026, so that combat and exploration could be changed after a closed beta test in November 2025.

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• 8. Awards and Sales

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  In 2015, The Seven Deadly Sins won the 39th Kodansha Manga Award in the shōnen category, sharing it with Yowamushi Pedal. The 2014 edition of Kono Manga ga Sugoi!, a list that surveys people in the manga and publishing industry, ranked it the fifth best series for male readers. It was nominated for the 2014 Manga Taishō and, at the 42nd Angoulême International Comics Festival in France, for Best Youth Comic.

  Reviewers were divided on the details. Jordan Richards of AIPT Comics called the series a must read for fans of medieval fantasy and traditional shōnen action. He praised the art, the character designs and the panel layouts, writing of the action scenes, "Everyone looks so distinct and some of the shots are just phenomenal". He also found it hard to tell exactly what happens in some moments.

  Rebecca Silverman of Anime News Network gave the first volume a B grade, calling the story a "neat take on the basic knights-in-shining-armor". She saw the influence of Akira Toriyama in Meliodas and of 1970s shōjo manga in the female characters. She felt Elizabeth lacked character development. Reviewing volume three, she observed that because the main characters are already extremely powerful, Suzuki can skip the training sequences typical of shōnen manga and spend time on relationships.

  Jason Thompson found the plot twists and dialog predictable, though he liked the art and the European setting. Silverman and Danica Davidson of Otaku USA both warned that Meliodas' perverted behavior toward Elizabeth, played for comedy, could be misinterpreted by some readers.

  The sales figures climbed steadily. By August 2014 the collected volumes had 5 million copies in circulation, and by January 2015 the number was 10 million. It reached 28 million in June 2018, over 37 million in March 2020 and over 38 million in November 2022. By September 2023 it stood at over 55 million.

  The first volume sold 38,581 copies in its first week and ranked thirteenth on the Oricon manga chart. The third volume debuted fourth with 135,164 copies. The thirteenth volume took first place with 442,492 copies, the series' best debut week. In 2015 the series finished second only to One Piece, with over 10.3 million copies sold.

  Theron Martin of Anime News Network felt the first anime started slowly but picked up in its second half. He praised the music and the main cast, and wrote that the show is "anything but a kiddie show" despite its semi-cartoonish look. In October 2017, Netflix revealed that the anime was the fourth most binge-watched show in its first 24 hours on the platform.

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