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. I have divided up the manga's publishing history into four phases.

The first phase is an era of almost unbroken monthly chapter releases. The average number of pages per chapter during this phase (excluding the 86-page first chapter as an outlier) was around 44 pages. This period lasted from 12/22/2015 until roughly 5/22/2017, from Mémoires 2 until 18. After 2017, the story would never again have this many pages per chapter as a given.

The second phase marks an overall decline in the page count of the chapters, if not a big change from the release schedule so far. From Mémoires 19 to 45 the average number of pages per chapter was 30 and the release schedule still roughly matched what it was in the first three years of the story's serialization. However, this marked the first period where signs of decline became visible. There are notably several gaps in publication where the manga skipped an issue of Joker. This phase of the story occured from 7/22/2017 to 3/21/2020.

The third phase is mostly similar to the second phase, taking place from Mémoire 46 to 56. The number of pages on average is lower, but not by a lot, with an average of 27 pages per chapter. However, the number and size of the hiatuses increased, meaning the wait time for the story to progress got bigger during this period. This occured from 6/22/2020 to 3/22/2022.

The story as of this writing is in the fourth stage. After Mémoire 57, the story was put on hiatus for an entire year. Its return marks the longest single chapters since the first phase, with two 40-page chapters in a row in Mémoires 58 and 59. Immediately after are a few chapters hovering between 15 to 20 pages until Mémoire 63 (with the exception of the 8-page long Entracte.) After 63, a second hiatus puts the story on pause from 4/22/2024 until 7/22/2025. This hiatus lasted for a year and 3 months. The story returned with Mémoire 64 in July of 2025, 65 followed in September, and 66 was released in December. Mémoire 67 is expected in March.

The average page count per Mémoire during this period is 23, but this does not include the sheer amount of time it took to get as much story as we do. This period contains 2 years and 3 months of nothing. Reading The Case Study of Vanitas today is an entirely different experience to what it was during the first seven years of its publication.

This 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.