Magic Kaito

Magic Kaito (まじっく快斗) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Gosho Aoyama. It premiered in Shogakukan's 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 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.

Synopsis
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 pass 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.

Characters

 * Kaito Kuroba (黒羽 快斗)
 * A smart, quirky and arrogant 17-year-old master illusionist. As Kaito Kid, he occasionally appears in the Case Closed series as an antagonist, but slowly develops a Lupin-esque complex. He has some feelings for his childhood friend Aoko Nakamori who he teases constantly. His alter ego is the Kaito Kid, a gentleman thief who publicly announces his heists; after his heists, he returns the stolen items to their owners. Throughout his escapades he has made many enemies, from semi-friendly detectives (such as Saguru Hakuba and Conan Edogawa/Jimmy Kudo) and policemen to rival phantom thieves and vicious professional gangsters. His Japanese voice actor is Kappei Yamaguchi and his English voice actor is Jerry Jewell.


 * Aoko Nakamori (中森 青子)
 * Kaito's best friend since childhood and love interest. She is an obstinate, impulsive and lighthearted girl. She often bickers with Kaito at school. She has feelings for Kaito, although she is afraid of admitting to him. She gets along well with Akako, but unknown to her, Akako envies her. Both girls vie for Kaito's affections. As the daughter of Inspector Nakamori, she despises the Kaito Kid, though she is unaware of the irony. Her Japanese voice actresses are Ayumi Fujimura in the specials and Mao Ichimichi in Magic Kaito 1412, Yukiko Iwai in episode 76 of Detective Conan, Minami Takayama in episode 219 and OVA 4 of Detective Conan.


 * Ginzo Nakamori (中森 銀三)
 * Aoko's father (known as Mace Fuller in Funimation's Detective Conan dub), a loud, aggressive Tokyo Metropolitan Police inspector assigned to capture the Kaito Kid. Tirelessly devoted to his work, he is (much to Aoko's dismay) frequently absent-minded at home. His Japanese voice actors are Unshō Ishizuka (1997–2018) and Kōji Ishii (2019–present) and his English voice actor is Jay Jones.


 * Konosuke Jii (寺井 黄之助)
 * An elderly man that assisted Toichi Kuroba as both magician and thief. Eight years after his master's murder, he began a masquerade as Kaito Kid in hopes of luring out the killers; when confronted by Kaito, he confessed the truth and conceded the mantle, becoming Kaito's assistant. By day he owns and operates the Blue Parrot billiards bar, which Kaito and Aoko sometimes patronize.


 * Toichi Kuroba (黒羽 盗一)
 * Kaito's (supposedly) deceased father. A world-famous magician, he originated the Kaito Kid costume as a gimmick for a Parisian performance, but became a genuine thief in order to divert attention from his wife Chikage's own criminal career, allowing her to retire in peace. Initially known as Phantom Thief 1412 (after his Interpol criminal code), he embraced Kaito Kid as a moniker after Booker Kudo publicly misread a journalist's scrawl of "1412" as KID. Toichi was killed after impeding a criminal syndicate's pursuit for Pandora. His Japanese voice actor is Shūichi Ikeda.


 * Chikage Kuroba (黒羽 千影)
 * Kaito's mother, initially shown as a plain housewife but later revealed to have once been the international thief Phantom Lady. During a heist in Paris, she fell in love with Toichi Kuroba and quit her criminal career to marry him. Even in retirement, she remains a free-spirited globetrotter, and frequently leaves Kaito alone at the Kuroba home in Japan, periodically checking in via video calls. She once tried to persuade her son to give up robbery and start a new life as a magician in Las Vegas. It is strongly implied in the "Midnight Crow" Arc that she knows who is Kaito Corbeau, the mysterious rival of Kaito Kid, who had recently become active in Las Vegas.


 * Akako Koizumi (小泉 紅子)
 * A haughty teenage witch, the world's last practitioner of "Red" sorcery. She delights in magically charming men to worship her, and becomes obsessed with Kaito Kid upon learning that he is destined to be the only man on Earth immune to her. By happenstance she attends the same school as Kaito and Aoko, and realizes Kaito's secret identity when he defies her advances on Valentine's Day. Initially she acts with very few morals, regularly scheming to magically enslave (or even kill) him; in time, however, she comes to admit a genuine affection for him, and begins using her magical resources to warn and aid him against other perils. Her Japanese voice actresses are Miyuki Sawashiro in the Magic Kaito specials, Eri Kitamura in Magic Kaito 1412, and Megumi Hayashibara in Detective Conan.


 * Saguru Hakuba (白馬探)
 * The half-British, half-Japanese son of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's Superintendent-General. Renowned across Europe as an amateur detective, he takes an interest in capturing Kaito Kid and resettles in Japan to do so, becoming a major school rival to Kaito. He is highly sophisticated and arrogantly proud of his skills, suspecting Kaito's secret identity almost immediately after their first meeting. However, he never succeeds in securing definitive proof. His Japanese voice actors are Akira Ishida in the Magic Kaito specials and in Detective Conan, and Mamoru Miyano in Magic Kaito 1412.


 * Snake (スネーク)
 * The main representative of the syndicate that killed Toichi Kuroba, and continues to pursue the Pandora gem. A vicious hitman, he possesses limited intelligence, but is always well-armed and often supported by several subordinates.

Connections with Case Closed
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.

Production
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). 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.

Manga
Written and illustrated by Gosho Aoyama, Magic Kaito has been sporadically serialized in Shogakukan's manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Sunday since June 10, 1987. It was halted in 1988 after two 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.

Outside of Japan, Magic Kaito has been published in China; Hong Kong; Taiwan; South Korea; Thailand; Vietnam; Finland; France; Germany; Italy; and Spain.

Original video animations
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.

Specials
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 Nippon Television Network System during Detective Conan'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 Conan series. The first aired on April 17, 2010.

Television series
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.