You know when you've been overdoing something when aspects of it begin to bleed into your dreams. So it has been the past few weeks for me and Trigun. Not too long after closing my eyes, my mind is filled with images of spiky-haired red-trenchcoat-wearing gunslingers, crucifix-gun-carrying murder-priests, freaky angelic monstrosities, and megalomaniacal psychopaths. It doesn't exactly make for a settled night's sleep. It's my own fault though, I suppose. After I was assigned to review the currently-running reboot season Trigun Stargaze weekly, I decided it was about damn time I properly finish reading Trigun's original manga, and finish watching the original TV show, both of which I'd attempted to get through in the past, but never quite managed.

I'd always loved the anime version of Gungrave, a PS2 game with iconic designs by Yasuhiro Nightow, Trigun's creator. The characters in that look so damned cool, however Nightow didn't write the story. The first half of Trigun's 1998 anime incarnation put me off with its lack of plot progression, far too many filler episodes, and repetitively goofy humor. If only I'd stuck around for the second half, because that shit is great. The manga… well… it's difficult to get into for its own reasons, which I'll explain shortly.

Trigun was originally serialized from 1995 to 1997 in Monthly Shonen Captain, until the magazine itself was canceled. These chapters were collected into three volumes, which were subsequently brought to the US English-language market by Dark Horse in 2003, aggregated into two volumes. This series was what the majority of the 1998 anime was based on, and it concludes on a cliffhanger with a version of the incident that occurs in episode 16 (and also episode 12 of 2023's Trigun Stampede). Due to lack of original manga material, the remainder of the 1998 anime was forced to create its own ending, though it adapts elements, especially from the first three volumes, of successor series Trigun Maximum.

Trigun Maximum switched publishers, and demographic, when it returned to manga store shelves in late 1997 in Young King Ours, a seinen magazine. It's essentially a greatly extended ending to Trigun's story, featuring some of the events and characters from the final third of the anime, but significantly elevating the scope and spectacle, even as it keeps the story's central philosophy intact. In a way, it's remarkable how the 1998 anime remains so true (at least in spirit) to Trigun Maximum, considering the manga didn't conclude until 2007!

Dark Horse brought all fourteen volumes of Trigun Maximum to English-language readers in paperback form between May 2004 and April 2009, and first editions of these are what line my bookshelves, and what I'll be basing this review on. However, it's important to note that recently, Dark Horse collected them all into five massive hardback Deluxe Editions, similar to their bestselling Berserk collections. These are much sturdier than the relatively puny standard-sized paperbacks, and probably work better as weapons against marauding mutant gun-toting cyborgs. These are almost certainly the preferred way for new readers to collect the series now, especially considering the paperbacks are all very out of print, and certain volumes are almost impossible to find for normal prices. It's worth remembering that the first three volumes of Trigun are essential and come in their own Deluxe Edition which must be read first to make any sense of Trigun Maximum's story.

And making sense of the story is one of those barriers to entry I mentioned earlier, because this is one of the most difficult to follow manga I have ever read. In some ways, it's probably better to watch at least the 1998 anime first, to get a feeling for the shape of the plot, otherwise it's easy to get lost in Nightow's unbelievably confusing layouts and almost-impossible-to-parse action sequences. Neither the 1998 nor modern version of the anime work as definitive manga adaptations, as both go off on tangents to do their own thing regularly, so neither are a substitute for gritting one's teeth and plowing through to the final volume. Writing as someone who's done just that, it's honestly worthwhile to do so.

Nightow is an avowed America-phile, as can be intuited by the fact that Trigun is a massive love letter to both classic Western movies and Star Wars. Set on a desolate desert planet onto which an entire fleet of human colony ships crashed one hundred and fifty years previously, the survivors and their descendants eke out a precipitous existence on the surface, their only sources of energy and water the mysterious “Plants” that previously powered their interstellar ships. Human society has devolved to that of the 1800s wild west, with small, disparate towns and their meager resources at the mercy of bandits and mercenaries. Vash the Stampede is the worst of them all; at least, that's how the media portrays him. An itinerant gunman, he wanders from place to place, bringing disaster in his wake. He's charged with destroying two of the seven major human cities, amongst countless other atrocities. The main joke is that none of these were essentially his fault, and despite carrying a gun, he never shoots to kill. Vash is a pacifist to a fault, though his permanently goofy smile hides a heart scarred by unbelievable pain and suffering.

Trigun Maximum features much less of the happy-go-lucky side of Vash than fans only familiar with his animated incarnations might expect. He's definitely still there, but this is a very different story to the predominantly episodic 1998 TV show, and even the modern reboot with its advantage of access to the entirety of the manga portrays Vash as clown-like as much as it also features his badass fighting prowess. Fights are what this manga is all about, as the Gung-Ho Guns take far more time and effort to defeat in this version than any other. It's got a lot more in common with other popular battle manga in that respect – fights drag on for chapter after chapter with very little progression between them, and even when it looks like one character might come out on top, often a rug is pulled, or some new mechanic is added that turns the tables. This is usually fine in a manga that's constructed in a way one expects – with easy to follow motion that flows between panels.

Unfortunately, in all of his enthusiasm to get to the next incredibly cool-looking pose, Nightow seems to forget he has readers he needs to guide through his insanely complicated world of flying bullets, swirling smoke, and limbs stuck out at weird angles. Don't get me wrong, sometimes Nightow's art is absolutely stunning. He has an incredible eye for character composition, and every few pages he draws some breathtaking “money shots” where Vash, or Wolfwood, or whichever crazy antagonist, strikes a pose with their weapon so cool that few other artists can match him. This skill does not translate well to visual storytelling, however. For much of my time, reading through these almost endless fights became an exercise in frustration and migraine-inducement, as I couldn't follow what the hell was meant to he happening. In a manga that seems to be about 80% action scenes, this is one hell of a major flaw. It does get better after the first few volumes, as Nightow's art improves, but the intense action finale that lasts several volumes also suffers from significant comprehensibility issues.

Even plot-heavy dialogue exchanges can be hard to follow, especially as several characters look similar to one another, and it's not often obvious which speech balloons are attributed to which character. At times, the unnecessarily clunky translation that loves to put quotation marks around every plot-relevant term significantly detracts from the ease of reading. I really feel Nightow could have done with a more rigorous editor looking over his layouts, and the translation could have done with another read-through.

Vash himself disappears for long sections of the narrative, sometimes seeming like a background character in his own story. There are two entire volumes dedicated to Wolfwood's last stand, and Vash only turns up halfway through the second. These volumes are great for Wolfwood fans, but I can't help but think this section could have been truncated by about two thirds, and little of value would have been lost. New character Livio, and the related Razlo, have their time to shine in this arc, and they both become extremely important in the final arc. They don't exist in the 1998 anime, though do turn up in similar circumstances, much earlier than expected, in Stampede.

Milly and Meryl fans don't get a whole lot to chew on either, as Nightow seems unsure what to do with them for the vast majority of Maximum's run. This is a shame, as their appearances tend to be more light-hearted and amusing, and help to humanize the sometimes distant Vash. There's no Milly/Wolfwood romance this time though; that was an invention of the 1998 anime. For spoiler-related Wolfwood backstory reasons, that's probably for the best. Out of all the characters, Wolfwood benefits the most from the extra time devoted to his development. We learn so much more about his traumatic childhood, plus his links to The Eye Of Michael, an assassin training organization, and through them, his links to Knives. For anyone who thought Trigun's 1998 anime ending was anticlimactic, the same can't be said of Trigun Maximum, which spends at least half of its page count ramping up to an unbelievably spectacular climax, filled with bonkers sci-fi spectacle and Star Wars-like space battles. Vash and his enemies' fights become more like US comics-esque battles between superheroic titans, which probably shouldn't surprise us because Nightow expresses his love for American comic artist and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane in one of his postscript manga skits.

Rather than a mere fight between brothers, the final confrontation between Vash and Knives reaches cosmic levels of importance, as forces from both the planet below and the skies above converge on a main antagonist so grossly mutated he barely resembles his earlier incarnation. Although this version of the story loses something of the anime's more subtle battle of ideologies rather than that of bombs and laser-beams, the overall themes, and even major plot turning points, are almost identical. Legato Bluesummers still forces Vash to make an impossible, painful choice. Vash loses a close friend from a heroic sacrifice. All of the Gung-Ho Guns must be defeated before he can face his final opponents.

The world Vash lives in is so well fleshed-out in its manga incarnation, and the stakes for survival of its populace much higher. Nightow's sci-fi western setting is deeply evocative and incredibly cool. Even with its stark storytelling issues, it has significant value because of the way it deepens and further explores concepts and characters the 1998 anime couldn't have hoped to do. Although Stampede and Stargaze have done an excellent job at incorporating great swathes of Trigun Maximum into their new mythology, they're absolutely not the same story. All three versions of Trigun – manga, and both anime incarnations, are worth experiencing not only because of their similarities, but the way their differences synergize with one another. There isn't one “true” way to enjoy Trigun, and at the moment I don't think I'd be able to choose between any of them.