Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Magazine scans and manga)

For your convenience we've coalesced our in-depth Live Action Sailor Moon coverage into one directory. Be sure to check out the Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon archives for all our articles!

We're going to get into the Sailor Moon manga re-release at the bottom for a bit, but first we're going to cover some magazine scans.

Special thanks for this update go to "wasurenagusa" who graciously provided us with her own scans from Japanese magazines Nakayoshi and Hyper Hobby.

Lets take a look at the Hyper Hobby scans first, as they're relevant to the live action series. You're going to want to click on the graphics to see the large version of the image.

What's new in this one is the jewelry shots

In this first picture you're going to want to pay attention to the column on your left. The commentary is rather... uninspired. They compliment Jupiter for having flashy earrings, point out that Venus's are "simple," note that "of course the blue drop earrings are Mercury's," and question whether Mars' are appropriate for a girl of her stature.

Am I the only one who thinks the bows are a tad large?

The close-ups on Sailor Moon at the bottom of this page are interesting. Those boots look kind of like pink rainboots to me. The tubing on the glove near the elbow is also rather curious. There's a lot more plastic in this getup than I had imagined.

Cover to a recent Nakayoshi issue. Nakayoshi is the manga serial that Sailor Moon ran in. You knew that, right?

For those of you who don't know, the Sailor Moon manga are going to be re-released in Japan. The cover says its going to have new colour pages, free stickers, new cover artwork, etc. We'll get into this more below.

Blue ink is an... interesting choice.

Worthy to note from that scan is that both Mars and Jupiter were "Miss Seventeen" in 2003 and 2002 respectively. Also, everyone except for Mars is listed as having been in Fashion magazines.

Now then, lets talk manga re-release. If you visit this page on the official Sailor Moon site you'll find effectively the exact same thing that's on the cover of Nakayoshi. (The text is literally all the exact same.)

- Retouched, corrected art
- New illustrations, color pages, and cover art by Naoko Takeuchi
- More pages per book

"There are to be 12 volumes in all, rather than the original 18 (presumably, this goes along with the "more pages per volume" blurb), with the first two to be released September 22. After that, one volume will come out each month."

We're going to flesh out his translations in a few days. Until then, that's the basic gist of the page. There are two very important things to note here.

First off, the fact that it says "Pretty GUARDIAN Sailor Moon" on that page in regard to the manga. It seems that initial suggestions that the naming schema change (from "Pretty Soldier" to "Pretty Guardian") was only for the live action series may have been incorrect. It is possible that they have renamed anything Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon into Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. Why? We don't really know. Perhaps because the licensing situation has changed now that all the rights have reverted back to Takeuchi.

For the time being, we at the Genvid Project are still going to refer to the Live Action Sailor Moon series as Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, and the manga/anime as Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon.

The second thing I'd like to note is that people have commented that this Japanese re-release may be why TokyoPop, who has announced they are interested in trying to re-release the Sailor Moon manga 'uncut', has been having trouble getting the rights to it.

There is a very good possibility the Japanese re-release being the stalling point is correct. However, lets not forget some other major news that Kodansha (Sailor Moon's publisher) announced earlier this year. They now have an exclusive agreement with Random House to have Kodansha manga translated under the Del Ray label. Who knows, if things pan out, maybe even Sailor V could come here.