Trigun

Known for its Space Western theme, Trigun is about a man named "Vash the Stampede" and the two Bernardelli Insurance Society employees who take after him around so as to minimize the harms inexorably caused by his appearance. Most of the damage attributed to Vash is actually caused by bounty hunters in pursuit of the "$$60,000,000,000" (sixty billion "double dollars") bounty on Vash's head for the destruction of the city of July. However, he cannot recall the occurrence plainly owed to his amnesia. Throughout his travels, Vash tries to save lives using non-lethal force. He is occasionally joined by a priest, Nicholas D. Wolfwood, who, like Vash, is a superb gunfighter with a mysterious past.

As the series progresses, we learn more about Vash's mysterious history and the history of human civilization on the planet Gunsmoke. The series often employs comic relief and is mostly light-hearted although its tone shifts toward darker and more dramatic situations as the series draws to a conclusion. The story line also involves moral conflict pertaining to the morality of killing other living things, even when justified.

Trigun is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Yasuhiro Nightow, published from 1996 to 2008 and spanning 17 collected volumes. The manga was serialized in Tokuma Shoten's Shonen Captain from the series debut in 1996 until the magazine's demise in 1997. The series continued in Shonen Gahosha's Young King Ours magazine, under the title Trigun Maximum, where it remained until finishing in 2008. Trigun was adapted into an animated television series in 1998. The Madhouse Studios production aired on TV Tokyo from April 1, 1998 to September 30, 1998, totaling 26 episodes.

Shonen Gahosha later bought the rights to the original three volume manga series and reissued it as two enlarged volumes. In October 2003 the US publisher Dark Horse Comics released the expanded first volume translated into English, keeping the original right-to-left format rather than mirroring the pages. Trigun Maximum followed quickly, and the entire 14-volume run was released over a five-year period from May 2004 to April 2009. Translations into French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish have also been released. An animated feature film was released in April 2010.