10 Longest Manga Series Of All Time
You thought Superman had a lot of issues? Wait till you see what they have coming out of Japan!
It's easy to look at something like Superman or Captain America and see a comic book character that's been around for the better part of a century with more than a thousand issues under their name. Looking at that, it's hard to imagine there are comics out there that have as many or more.
As it happens, neither Marvel nor DC have much when compared to some Manga titles. These are books that regularly churn out so much content, having a mere thousand or so issues is child's play, and many have far more.
These are comics that have been around for decades like their Western counterparts, but there's something about the Japanese creative spirit that keeps these books going for longer than most artists or writers could ever dream of — and most of them are done by only one or two people!
That's not how things are done at DC or the House of Ideas, which makes the Japanese comic book industry one of the most impressive on the planet. While many are turned into anime series and films, a lot of these take up plenty of shelf space as some of the longest-running comic book series of all time.
In the world of Manga, a chapter is around 15-25 pages released weekly. A volume is a collection of chapters into a single book called tankōbon.
10. Haguregumo (浮浪雲)
Number of Chapters: 1,039
Number of Volumes: 112
Haguregumo, or "Vagrant Cloud" in English, was a series written and illustrated by George Akiyama from 1973 until 2017. By the time the series came to an end, 1,039 chapters were published by Big Comic Original, which amounted to an impressive 112 tankōbon volumes.
The series takes place at the end of the Edo period in Japan and follows Cloud and his family, which consists of his wife Turtle, their eleven-year-old son Shinnosuke, and eight-year-old daughter Flower. Everyone in the Cloud family prefers to avoid work so that they can play, and Cloud is a notorious womaniser.
The series was adapted into an anime film in 1982, but thus far no anime series has been adapted from Haguregumo. In 1979, George Akiyama's work was recognised with the Shogakukan Manga Award for the general category, and while it wasn't his only manga, Haguregumo was easily his most popular series.
Sadly, George Akiyama passed away in May of 2020 of unspecified causes. Fortunately, he was able to bring his seminal work to a proper conclusion in 2017, ending a 44-year run as one of the most popular weekly manga of its time.