Trigun


Trigun is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Yasuhiro Nightow. The manga was serialized in Tokuma Shoten's Shōnen Captain in 1995 with three collected volumes when the magazine was discontinued in 1997. The series continued in Shōnen Gahosha's Young King Ours magazine, under the title Trigun Maximum, where it remained until finishing in 2007.
Both manga were adapted into an anime television series in 1998. Madhouse animated the TV series which aired on TV Tokyo from April 1, 1998 to September 30, 1998, totaling 26 episodes. The show aired in the United States starting in 2003, as part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block.
An animated feature film called was released in April 2010.

Plot

Trigun revolves around a man known as "Vash the Stampede" and two Bernardelli Insurance Society employees, Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson, who follow him around in order to minimize the damages inevitably caused by his appearance. Most of the damage attributed to Vash is actually caused by bounty hunters in pursuit of the sixty billion double dollar bounty on Vash's head for the destruction of the city of July. However, he cannot remember the incident due to retrograde amnesia, being able to recall only fragments of the destroyed city and memories of his childhood. Throughout his travels, Vash tries to save lives using non-lethal force. He is occasionally joined by a priest, Nicholas D. Wolfwood, who, like Vash, is a superb gunfighter with a mysterious past. As the series progresses, more about Vash's past and the history of human civilization on the planet Gunsmoke is revealed.

Media

Manga

After leaving college, Yasuhiro Nightow had gone to work selling apartments for the housing corporation Sekisui House, but struggled to keep up with his manga drawing hobby. Reassured by some successes, including a one-shot manga based on the popular video game franchise Samurai Spirits, he quit his job to draw full-time. With the help of a publisher friend, he submitted a Trigun story for the February 1996 issue of the Tokuma Shoten magazine Shōnen Captain, and began regular serialization two months later in April.
However, Shōnen Captain was canceled early in 1997, and when Nightow was approached by the magazine Young King Ours, published by Shōnen Gahōsha, they were interested in him beginning a new work. Nightow though, was troubled by the idea of leaving Trigun incomplete, and requested to be allowed to finish the series. The publishers were sympathetic, and the manga resumed in 1998 as Trigun Maximum. The story jumps forward two years with the start of Maximum, and takes on a slightly more serious tone, perhaps due to the switch from a shōnen to a seinen magazine. Despite this, Nightow has stated that the new title was purely down to the change of publishers, and rather than being a sequel it should be seen as a continuation of the same series. The 14th tankōbon was published on February 27, 2008.
Shōnen Gahōsha later bought the rights to the original three volume manga series and reissued it as two enlarged volumes. In October 2003 the US publisher Dark Horse Comics released the expanded first volume translated into English by Digital Manga, keeping the original right-to-left format rather than mirroring the pages. Trigun Maximum followed quickly, and the entire 14-volume run was released over a five-year period from May 2004 to April 2009. Translations into French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish have also been released.
An anthology manga titled, Trigun: Multiple Bullets featuring short stories written by several manga artists such as Boichi, Masakazu Ishiguru, Satoshi Mizukami, Ark Performance, Yusuke Takeyama, Yuga Takauchi and Akira Sagami was released in by Shonen Gahosha in Japan in December 2011 and in North America on March 6, 2013.

Anime

produced an anime series based on the manga, also titled Trigun. Directed by Satoshi Nishimura, the series was broadcast on TV Tokyo from April 1 to September 30, 1998. It is licensed for DVD and Blu-ray in the United States by Funimation Entertainment, who re-released it on DVD on October 27, 2010. The show failed to garner a large audience in Japan during its original showing in 1998, but gained a substantial fan base following its United States premiere on Adult Swim in early 2003. Nightow has stated that due to the finality of the anime's ending, it is unlikely any continuation will be made.

Film

A Trigun film was originally announced in February 2008 to be released in 2009. The film titled Trigun: Badlands Rumble opened in theaters in Japan on April 24, 2010, and was first shown to an American audience at the Sakura-Con 2010 in Seattle, Washington on, April 2, 2010.
At Anime Expo 2010, Funimation announced that they had licensed the film as they had with the TV series and planned to release it into theaters. The film made its US television premiere on Saturday, December 28, 2013, on Adult Swim's Toonami block.

Reception

Though the series received a lukewarm response from native Japanese audiences, Trigun has proved to be a major success with North American viewers during its airing on the Cartoon Network Adult Swim starting in 2003. The anime has received mostly positive reviews from American critics who have praised the series' moral themes and ability to balance lighthearted humor with its more serious plot. The anime series is frequently listed as one of the best anime series; in 2001, Wizard's Anime Magazine listed Trigun as the 38th best series on their "Top 50 Anime released in North America", and in 2010 The Los Angeles Times journalist Charles Solomon placed the series as the seventh best anime on his "Top 10".
Theron Martin of Anime News Network gave the anime adaptation a B+ praising the writing stating, "The series never wallows in the clichés inherent to this format simply because the surprisingly high quality of its writing never allows that to happen." However he continued to criticize the visuals stating, "Character rendering regularly looks more like rough drafts than refined final products, with the artists often struggling just to stay on model." Mike Toole of Anime News Network named Trigun as one of the most important anime of the 1990s. In 2009 Trigun Maximum won the Best Comic Seiun Award at the 48th Japan Science Fiction Convention.
columnist H.D. Russell reviewed the anime adaptation of the series in early 2016, as part of the "Good Old Anime Review" section focusing on popular anime of the 1990s to early 2000s. Though, noting the series hasn't aged well in terms of animation and English voice acting quality, Russell states the depth of the characters and moral themes of the series more than compensate for its faults. Russell concluded his review giving Trigun a rank of four out of a five stars stating, "Trigun is very often overshadowed by its close cousin Cowboy Bebop, which is sad, because it truly is a delight to watch. Despite having only decent voice acting, average music, and relatively static visuals, Trigun is an absolute blast that had me laughing and thinking the whole way. While it's not perfect, it is fun and it does ask the questions that will make viewers ponder for years to come without ever offering them an answer. Trigun is one that went straight from my backlog to my heart and is truly greater than the sum of its parts."
The success of the animated series increased the popularity of the original manga source material with the US release's first volume run of 35,000 sold out shortly after release. The second volume concluded the original series early the next year, and went on to be the top earning manga release of 2004.
Despite its relative popularity in the West, Trigun never gained widespread appeal to Japanese audiences. Suggested factors include the "old west" setting, European style character names and a lack of Japanese cultural elements. This would make Trigun one of the rare examples of an anime that is far more successful in the West than it was within its country of origin.