Volume 03

Seraph of the End 3 (終わりのセラフ 3) (also known as Seraph of the End, Vol. 3) is the third volume to the Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign manga.

Contents

 * 8. Mitsuba's Squad (三葉のチーム)


 * 9. First Extermination (殲滅のハジマリ)


 * 10. Vampire Attack (襲撃のヴァンパイヤ)


 * 11. Queen's Contract (女王とのケイヤク)

Japanese Summary
念願の吸血鬼殲滅部隊に配属された優一郎. 自信過剰気味な三葉が部隊に加わり、渋谷より出撃！　だが優一郎の勝手な行動で、初戦から仲間を危険にさらし…. また新宿攻略中の吸血鬼は圧倒的な強さを見せて…!?

English Summary
Yūichirō survives the trial to acquire Cursed Gear — demon-possessed weaponry that is humanity's only hope for combating the vampire scourge. But times are dangerous, and instead of getting to celebrate his newfound power, Yūichirō and his friends are given their first mission: head to Shinjuku and investigate vampire activity. Unbeknownst to Yūichirō, Mika, his best friend and now a vampire, is headed for the same place.

Characters
List of characters in order of appearance:

Afterword
Hello. I'm Takaya Kagami, author of Seraph of the End. This time I've been given nine whole pages of bonus content to cover, so I thought I'd talk a little about the world before the apocalypse, as shown in the Kodansha light novel series Seraph of the End: Guren Ichinose's Catastrophe at 16. I even borrowed a few illustrations, like the one bellow.

This is an illustration of when Guren and his teammates Sayuri, Shigure, Mito and Norito were all in high school. Yu and Mika were only eight years old at the time. What do you think? If you like what you see, I hope you'll consider picking up the light novel.

So, five pages about the setting means I have four pages left for an afterword. Last volume, the designer really spiffed up my short afterword, adding some character designs from Mr. Yamamoto and arranging it all to flow into an ad for the next volume. I thought it was really cool. You never get neat illustrations like that in a novel's afterword. When I first saw the rough layout I was stunned by how awesome it looked.

I've had some of my novels remade as a manga by various artists before, but this is the first time I've built the manga and novel from scratch, writing chapters for both every month. Seeing even my afterwords getting the manga treatment gives me some insight into how manga works and what it's like. It's enlightening.

How serialization works, deadlines, the process of putting it together: everything is new to me, making it all very exciting.

Exciting, but also busy. And not having any recent happenings worth talking about in an afterword can be problematic too.

So, yeah. I've run out of things to say, but I still have pages left to fill. This time, I think I'll talk a little about how Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign is made, and how the three of us go about putting it together. Here's how it works:


 * 1. Kagami thinks up the characters, setting and concept for the chapter and keeps in line with the overall story.


 * 2. If new characters, settings, and weapons, etc. are involved, a request goes to Yamato Yamamoto for designs. Utterly awesome designs come back, delightfully surprising Kagami.


 * 3. Kagami writes a script for four chapters' worth of content and presents it to the editor for discussion. (Four chapters equals one volume, so I try to work in four-chapter chunks, but recently I'm managing two-chapter chunks. (T_T) Once the editor gives the okay, it goes to the storyboard artist Daisuke Furuya.


 * 4. Storyboard artist Furuya comes up with mind-blowingly amazing storyboards perfectly in line with what Kagami wanted. Sometimes he expands the ideas far beyond the expected, amazing Kagami further.


 * 5. Yamamoto will draw the manga, according to the storyboards. This is the final product that everyone sees when they open the finished manga. It's really cool.


 * 6. Typesetting is done on the finished art, the editor edits, red ink going everywhere. A call goes to Kagami saying, "There's no time left, I need you to look at this PDF within the next hour and get back to me!!" Kagami jumps up and proofreads the work for errors like misspellings and characters using the wrong nicknames. (This is why I try to be at home at the end of every month ^_^)


 * 7. Editor realizes there are no chapter titles. Kagami quickly churns some out. (I usually come up with the titles in four-chapter chunks, but sometimes there are slips ^_^)

And it's finished! Writing this out makes it seem pretty simple, but seeing how the wonderful storyboards, the manga and everything else turns out each time really makes me grateful to work with such wonderful people. Thank you very much.

Well, I think this topic has filled a good number of pages, but since, unlike novels, word-count and line-count per page can be different due to layout, I'm not sure if this will be enough. I have no idea what I'm going to do if there's a lot of blank pages left after this. (^_^)

Oh, wait! I just came up with an idea that'll fill more space. In the most recent volumes of my other novel series, The Legend of the Legendary Heroes (published by Fujimi Shokoban), we decided that we would trade plugs for each series, so I got to do a full two-page AD for Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign in that volume! And I haven't yet done a plug for LOTLH here! But I don't think I'll have enough pages left, so that will have to wait until next volume. Sorry! (I really hope my editors for that series don't get mad at me!)

So yeah, that's all for this time.

— Takaya Kagami