This year's 41st issue of Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine (cover seen right) published the 500th chapter of Hiro Mashima's Fairy Tail manga on Wednesday. To commemorate the milestone, the magazine is holding a lottery where up to 500 readers can win color reproductions of art from the manga.

The manga is also celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. It will get an art exhibit that will take place for nine days from September 17 to 25 at Tokyo Skytree Town, and will feature art from the manga's first chapter up to the latest in the current Alvarez arc.

The manga follows the adventures of world's most notorious mage guild, Fairy Tail. It already inspired two television anime, several previous original video anime projects, and spinoff manga. The franchise's first anime film, Fairy Tail the Movie: Phoenix Priestess, opened in Japan on August 18, 2012, and Mashima announced a second film in May 2015. The television anime series also revealed in March that a new project is in the works.

Kodansha published the manga's 56th volume in Japan on July 15, and will publish the 57th volume on September 16. Del Rey published the first 12 volumes of the original manga in North America, and Kodansha resumed publishing the manga in English with the 13th volume in 2011. Crunchyroll streamed the second television anime into several countries as it aired in Japan, and Funimation has been releasing DVD/Blu-ray Disc sets.

From Wednesday, September 7 to October 4, Kodaansha's manga app Magazine Pocket is posting all 145 chapters from Tsuyoshi Yasuda's 17 Over Drive manga volumes for free. The first 10 chapters are free today, and five more will be free on the app every day until the end of the campaign. Also during the campaign, the chapters (when they are not free) are half-price.

Source: Comic Natalie