Usagi Tsukino oversleeps, flunks her tests, cries in public and eats too much cake. She is also the one thing standing between Tokyo and the end of the solar system.

Naoko Takeuchi serialized the series in Kodansha's shojo magazine Nakayoshi from 1991 to 1997: sixty chapters plus side stories, later collected into eighteen tankobon volumes. It starts small and domestic, a 1990s Tokyo of school uniforms, arcades and crushes, where a schoolgirl transforms and goes hunting for a magical artifact called the Legendary Silver Crystal. She ends up leading a group of comrades, the Sailor Soldiers, renamed the Sailor Guardians in later editions, against villains who want the crystal for themselves.

The art is shojo at its most confident: long limbs, huge eyes, panel borders that dissolve into ribbon and starlight the moment a fight begins. The comedy is broad, the romance is sincere, and Takeuchi lets a failed math quiz sit in the same chapter as the fate of the planets without either one looking silly.

Sixty chapters is not much room, so the plot moves. If your only Sailor Moon is the anime, the manga is the compressed version, quicker to escalate, with Takeuchi's own linework carrying the weight. Read it if you want magical-girl storytelling at the source, or if you have a soft spot for a heroine who saves everything and still cannot get her homework in on time.