Proper Japanese Title: コミック乱
Comic Ran is a monthly jidaigekiga magazine and became a major turning point for the brand of Leed Publishing when it became their primary comic magazine. Before the company had even changed its name to Leed, their primary comic magazine had been Leed Comic. While Takao Saito (the founder of Leed) had been a major ongoing contributor to that magazine, it was branded as more of a general men's gekiga magazine with covers generally unrelated to the contents. Saito serialized many works in the decades of Leed but in 1995 a short-lived spin-off magazine (Leed Comic Gallery) was launched to feature Saito's new serialization of Onihei Hankachō which transferred from Leed Comic.
This Leed Comic spin-off quickly became an Onihei-branded book (at which point it became the cover feature) before changing its name to Ran and relaunching as an independent magazine in 1999 (Leed Comic itself ended a few years later). Since the beginning, Onihei has featured on the cover of almost every single issue of the magazine and it became Saito's second series to surpass one-hundred volumes after Golgo 13. In the final years of his career, these were his two major ongoing works and both continued on after his death.
Because of this branding, rather than being general gekiga, Ran's serializations are generally jidaigeki and the magazine primarily serializes the works of other veterans of the industry. Notable long-running serializations have included Fuunjitachi: Bakumatsu-Hen (a continuation of a decades-old serialization from Comic Tom that was a mainstay of Ran for its first two decades and memorialized in 2021 after the author's passing left it unfinished) and Oshima Yasuichi's Kenkaku Shoubai which received the cover a handful of times and shared it jointly with Onihei.
Apart from its own special-issues, Ran had one major spin-off in Comic Ran Twins (which in turn had Comic Ran Twins: Sengoku Bushō Retsuden). Ran's regular contributors have included Shinzo Tomi, Kaoru Hazuki, Takahama Kan and it regularly features adaptions of novels, drawn by some of the aforementioned authors as well as Tetuzoh Okadaya, Takami Mako and Yasuteru Iwata. Some of its more recent serializations were transferred from other magazines or sequels to outside franchises including Ogino's Kujaku-O: Sengoku Tensei, Matsumoto's Ichigeki, Niwano's Henshin Ninja Arashi Kai or Hiramatsu's Oedo Black Angels.
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