Yasuhiro Nightow had gone to work selling apartments for the housing corporation Sekisui House, but struggled to keep up with his manga drawing hobby. Reassured by some successes, including a one-shot manga based on the popular video game franchise Samurai Spirits, he quit his job to draw full time. With the help of a publisher friend, he submitted a Trigun story for the February 1995 issue of the Tokuma Shoten magazine Shōnen Captain, and began regular serialisation two months later in April.
However, Shōnen Captain was cancelled early in 1997, and when Nightow was approached by the magazine Young King Ours, published by Shōnen Gahōsha, they were interested in him beginning a new work. He was however troubled[2] by the idea of leaving Trigun incomplete, and requested to be allowed to finish the series. The publishers were sympathetic, and the manga resumed in 1998 as Trigun Maximum (トライガンマキシマム, Toraigan Makishimamu?). The story jumps forward two years with the start of Maximum, and takes on a slightly more serious tone, perhaps due to the switch from a shōnen to a seinen magazine. Despite this, Nightow has stated[3] that the new title was purely down to the change of publishers, and rather than being a sequel it should be seen as a continuation of the same series. The 12th tankōbon was published on July 26, 2006.
Shōnen Gahōsha 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. With the anime series already well known in the US, the first print run of 30,000 sold out[4] shortly after release. The second volume concluded the original series early the next year, and went on to be the top earning[5] graphic novel of 2004. Trigun Maximum followed quickly, and as of January 2008 twelve volumes have been released. Translations into French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish have also been released.