Odds & Ends

The Case Study of Vanitas has been serializing since December of 2015, following the conclusion of Mochizuki’s prior manga Pandora Hearts. Over the years the manga has had some changes to its publishing schedule, unfortunately as a result of the author’s frequent illnesses. This section is intended to document these changes as of 2026. I have used Gnuplot to chart the number of pages per Mémoire by when the Mémoire was published. Here’s the image since it’s too wide to go on the webpage. There are basically three phases to the story.

The first phase marks an era of regular new Mémoires published on a monthly basis, roughly from the start of the manga on 12/22/2015 until 6/22/2016, when Mémoire 18 was published. This era also has the highest average number of pages per Mémoire in this story’s publishing history.

The next phase visibly has half the number of pages per Mémoire, and with many more hiatuses than before. This era takes place from 7/22/2017 to 3/22/2022. From Mémoire 57 onward the schedule collapses. The manga goes on a hiatus in May 2022, only to return in the following year on the same month. In the meantime Gangan Joker's Twitter account uploads a message on 8/22/2024 regarding Vanitas that includes a message from Mochizuki. The basic meaning of the message is that the hiatuses are the result of physical and mental problems, and that she is discovering how to work while also taking breaks.

In the final phase, the one in which we currently reside, we had a brief period of regular updates only to have another hiatus, this time nine months long. As of this writing we are on Mémoire 66, published on 12/21/2025. The last three years of the story has been mostly hiatus with not much story progress to speak of. It is still unknown what, if any, Mémoire release schedule we are on.

The following is a table of the manga's publishing history so far. Since I do not speak Japanese I needed to compile this information by awkward methods such as looking at descriptions of Gangan Joker issues on Japanese Amazon or checking the official Joker magazine account's past Twitter posts. However, I was able to obtain enough definite dates to fill in any gaps, and if there are errors in this table they are probably in just the total page counts. Metadata is hard to find for some reason, so occasionally I had to count up the total pages myself.

One day I became curious: what model of revolver is Dante’s gun?

In Pandora Hearts Mochizuki chose to give Gilbert two historical firearms and drew them accurately. These were the British Webley Top-Break revolver and the American Colt Single Action Army. Knowing that the author had a history of faithfully depicting historical guns, even in stories that take place in alternate universes from our own, I figured there was a decent chance Dante’s snub nose revolver corresponded to a gun in real life.

My initial theory was that it was some kind of French service revolver. However, while searching online for famous models from the time period, it became clear that Dante’s gun had an unusual combination of traits that kept it from fully resembling the various revolvers I compared it to. These traits included strange winglike projections on the sides of the gun that sat just in front of the cylinder, a high rear sight, and a long cylinder release lever on the left side of the gun. There was lastly a kind of retcon done back in volume 1: early on it had a half-moon sight, but in later appearances it took on a more modern-looking blade sight. But the half-moon sight from the very first clear look at the gun was the key toward finding the correct model. Before that retcon it was probably a faithful reproduction of the gun. I had seen this revolver before, I began to realize. Not many guns from this period had this many curiously shaped metal pieces on its surface. Neither did many guns have those metal holster guides, as I later learned the metal flaps were. In the end, it was no other than a snub nose version of the Webley Mk. I. Dante wasn’t using a French gun, he was using the British service revolver!

Vanitas shot Noé in the face with a Webley .455 caliber bullet. No wonder he was so mad.