The Five Star Stories marks 40 years with a memorial book

KADOKAWA will publish F.S.S. EPISODES of 40th MEMORIAL, a memorial book for Mamoru Nagano's The Five Star Stories, on 1 October 2026. The 160-page A4-format hardback costs 3,630 yen including tax, is credited to Nagano and lists the Monthly Newtype editorial department as editor.

Forty years of Mortar Headds and GTMs

The Five Star Stories began serialisation in Monthly Newtype in 1986 and has run ever since, following the knights, their artificial Fatima partners and the giant Mortar Headd machines of the Joker star system. KADOKAWA says the series and its related books have now passed 10 million copies in cumulative circulation, with the most recent collected volume, volume 19, still on sale.

What the book contains

Most of the book is a reference. A section called ROBOTER Surveys works through every Mortar Headd and GTM that has appeared in the story, pairing the older Mortar Headd designs with their GTM counterparts and annotating each in order of appearance. EPISODES Reminisced sets the story and its publications out year by year, and All about EST Suits gathers more than 20 of the outfits worn by the Fatima Est.

Two further sections look forward rather than back. EARLY ACCESS DESIGNS 8 carries an early look at designs from the next chapter ahead of the art book F.S.S. DESIGNS 8, and the book also collects Ganbare EST-chan, the title-page manga that has run since 1999 and carries the author's own updates on the series.

A 500th issue of Newtype alongside it

Monthly Newtype's November issue, due on 9 October 2026, is the magazine's 500th. Nagano provides the cover illustration and an opening interview covering both the memorial book and the anniversary.

F.S.S. EPISODES of 40th MEMORIAL is published on 1 October 2026, ISBN 978-4-04-117830-0, A4-format, 160 pages, priced at 3,630 yen including tax.

Our opinion

Anniversary books usually sell nostalgia; this one is closer to a catalogue raisonné. Forty years of serialisation and 19 collected volumes have been reduced to an inventory of machines, and that is a revealing editorial choice, because the part of The Five Star Stories that has stayed most constant across four decades is the design work, which is presumably why the same drawings have spent the past two years touring five Japanese cities as an exhibition. The DESIGNS 8 preview is the other tell. A memorial edition that ships with an early look at the next chapter is not closing anything down, it is packaging the archive and the serialisation as two separate products, and for a series whose readers collect its art books as closely as its story, the reference volume may end up doing more work than the manga.