Magic Kaito

Magic Kaito (Japanese: まじっく快斗, Hepburn: Majikku Kaito) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Gosho Aoyama. It premiered in Shogakukan's shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Sunday in June 1987. It is Aoyama's first serialized manga. The story depicts the adventures of Kaito Kuroba, a teenage magician who secretly operates as the internationally-wanted phantom thief Kaito Kid.
Though the series was popular in its initial run, Aoyama placed it on hiatus in late 1988—after two tankōbon volumes had been published—in order to focus on Yaiba and later Case Closed. Since then, new installments have been produced very sporadically, often years apart; a third volume was compiled in 1994, a fourth in 2007, and a fifth in 2017; three more chapters were published in 2024. Notwithstanding this, Kaito Kid has (along with several associated characters) made numerous appearances in Case Closed and various spinoff media, achieving much wider recognition through them.
12 animated television specials based on the series have been produced by TMS Entertainment and aired between 2010 and 2012. A 24-episode anime series titled Magic Kaito 1412 was produced by A-1 Pictures and aired from October 2014 to March 2015.
High-school class clown Kaito Kuroba, son of world-famous—and deceased—magician Toichi Kuroba, leads a carefree life in Tokyo with his childhood friend Aoko Nakamori. However, on the eighth anniversary of his father's death, he stumbles across a hidden section of his home that reveals his father's double life: that of the internationally-notorious thief Kaito Kid. Shortly after, he finds his father's elderly aide Konosuke Jii masquerading as Kid in a new series of burglaries; when cornered, Jii admits the "accident" which had killed the elder Kuroba in his final show was actually murder, and the culprits remain at large.
Vowing to avenge his father, Kaito personally assumes Kaito Kid's mantle, and continues the heists for the same reason as Jii: to draw out his father's killers. By day, he maintains the guise of an ordinary high-schooler and his friendship with Aoko, all while knowing her father is a police inspector long-obsessed with capturing Kid.
After many outlandish adventures, Kaito eventually discovers that the killers belong to a mysterious crime syndicate pursuing a legendary jewel known as Pandora. Per their sources, Pandora is a doublet—a gem hidden within a larger gem—that glows red under moonlight and sheds "tears" during the passing of the Volley Comet, every 10,000 years. These tears, if drunk, will bestow immortality.
With the comet's next pass fast approaching, Kaito sets out to find—and destroy—Pandora first, turning his focus exclusively to large, long-storied gemstones.
While Magic Kaito has always shared a number of elements with Aoyama's later series Case Closed (such as the Tropical Land amusement park), Aoyama did not originally view them as a serious shared universe. When planning a Case Closed storyline in 1997 guest-starring Kaito Kid and Inspector Nakamori (with cameo appearances from Kaito Kuroba in his civilian identity and Aoko Nakamori), he intended for it to be a standalone, with no impact on either series' continuity besides a retroactive origin for Kid's alias. However, the story's unexpected popularity inspired many more Kid appearances throughout Case Closed, and even a Magic Kaito storyline guest-starring a full-grown Jimmy Kudo.
In 2006, Aoyama explicitly tied Kaito's backstory into that of Case Closed, revealing that Toichi Kuroba had not only maintained a rivalry with Booker Kudo as the first Kaito Kid, but tutored both Vivian Kudo and Sharon Vineyard in disguise arts. A 2010 storyline tied the two series closer still, with a Case Closed story introducing Chikage Kuroba's identity as the Phantom Lady immediately followed by a Magic Kaito story explaining her past (as well as the context of Kaito's actions in the present-day).
Despite this, Aoyama has repeatedly stated that the two series exist in separate continuities, in particular citing Akako's sorcery as an element that cannot coexist with Case Closed. He has also denied longstanding fan theories that Snake belongs to the "Black Organization" serving as Case Closed's main antagonists, and maintained that—with the one-time exception of 2012's "Mystery Train" arc—Kaito Kid would not have any story involvement with the latter.
In 1985, having been convinced by university friends to pursue a professional manga career, Aoyama drafted a 40-page one-shot titled Nonchalant Lupin (さりげなく ルパン, Sarigenaku Rupan). This story, inspired by Aoyama's childhood love of mystery and phantom-thief fiction in addition to Zoetrope Studios' The Escape Artist (1982), featured a mischievous teenage magician named Kaito Lupin trying to save his childhood friend Aoko Holmes from corrupt school officials.
Aoyama initially sent Lupin to Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine, where he met enough approval to win an honorable mention at the thirty-fifth New Manga Awards, but was warned by an editor that his art-style would need modification to "fit" the magazine's general aesthetic if he were hired. The following year, Aoyama approached Shogakukan's Weekly Shōnen Sunday, which made no such stipulations; heartened, Aoyama quickly expanded Lupin into the basis for an ongoing series, renaming its lead characters Kaito Kuroba and Aoko Nakamori and converting its mostly-metaphorical Arsène Lupin motifs into an actual phantom thief identity.
Written and illustrated by Gosho Aoyama, Magic Kaito has been sporadically serialized in Shogakukan's shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Sunday since June 10, 1987. It was halted in 1988 after two tankōbon volumes, but new chapters have been occasionally released since then; a third volume was published in 1994, a fourth volume in 2007 and a fifth volume in 2017. In 2011 the first four volumes were republished in "Treasured Editions" from August 15 to December 16. Two versions of each volume were released, one containing a DVD of one of the TV specials. Three more chapters, not yet collected in a volume, were published between April 10 and April 24, 2024.
Magic Kaito received its first anime adaptation in 2000, with the launch of Case Closed's direct-to-video OVA series: the first of these OVAs adapted "Yaiba VS. Kaito!" (Vol. 3's fifth chapter, originally published in 1989). The fourth, released in 2004, adapted "Crystal Mother" (Vol. 4's first chapter, originally published in 1995).
Between these two OVAs, the Case Closed anime also adapted "Black Star" (Vol. 4's third and fourth chapters, originally published in 1999) as part of its 219th episode, a two-hour special. This occupied roughly one-third of the episode, with the other two-thirds adapting an unrelated Kaito Kid story from the Case Closed manga.
TMS Entertainment produced twelve animated television specials based on Magic Kaito between 2010 and 2012. All have been directed by Toshiki Hirano, and aired on Yomiuri TV during Case Closed's regular time slot. The first three were titled as "Detective Conan Specials" despite the fact that none have had anything to do with the Case Closed / Detective Conan series. The first aired on April 17, 2010.
A 24-episode anime series titled Magic Kaito 1412 (まじっく快斗1412) was created by A-1 Pictures and aired on NNS from October 4, 2014, to March 28, 2015. The series was announced as a new simulcast beginning with episode 13 on Crunchyroll for audiences in North America.