Planet Ladder

Planet Ladder (Japanese: プラネット·ラダー, Hepburn: Puranetto Radā) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Yuri Narushima. Appearing as a serial in the shōjo (targeted towards girls) manga magazine Crimson from the March 1998 issue to the May 2003 issue, the chapters of Planet Ladder were published by Sobisha/Shueisha in seven tankōbon volumes from December 1998 to May 2004. Based on the Japanese folktale The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in which a girl is discovered to be the princess of the moon, the story focuses on a teenager named Kaguya, who is prophesied to save only one of the nine parallel worlds, and her quest to bring peace to a warring universe while finding her true identity.

Planet Ladder was licensed for an English-language translation in North America by Tokyopop, and released from April 2002 to March 2005 after being serialized in Tokyopop's manga anthology Smile. Planet Ladder was part of Tokyopop's line-up of manga in its original right-to-left format; previously, the majority of manga licensed in the United States was "flopped" to read left-to-right for a Western audience. Planet Ladder was positively received by English-language readers, with two volumes placing in ICv2's list of best-selling graphic novels. The series received generally positive reviews from English-language critics. On April 2, 2007, it went out of print in North America.