Bleach Anniversary Chapter Gets New Cover Art for Digital Release

New art of Ichigo Kurosaki will be included with the digital release of Bleach's "No Breaths from Hell" chapter.

The new illustration was revealed on official Twitter account of the series' creator, Tite Kubo and depicts the older appearance of Bleach's central hero. The new art will serve as the cover for the digital collected volume of the one-shot chapter, which was originally released through Weekly Shonen Jump last August. The 74-page continuation of the classic shonen manga was released to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the publication of the series' first chapter.

"No Breaths from Hell" was originally promoted as being a single, standalone story, but fans were pleasantly surprised when it turned out the chapter seemed to be a teaser for a new sequel series, as it sets up a new foe for Ichigo and the rest of the Soul Reapers to tackle. The manga was very well-received and since its release, fans have been anxiously waiting for the official confirmation that Kubo's beloved supernatural-action series would indeed receive a full length continuation, but so far, both Kubo and Bleach's publisher Shueisha have been tight-lipped about any possible sequels.

While the manga's future is still a mystery, it has been confirmed at least that the Bleach anime will return for a new season. The new season will adapt the Thousand-Year Blood War arc, which was originally published after the original Bleach anime stopped airing, so it was previously never animated. The anime series' return was originally announced in March 2020. New details about the anime's new run of episodes are expected to be revealed at this year's Jump Festa, which will livestream its Bleach presentation on Dec. 18 at 6:00 P.M. JST.

Bleach originally premiered in 2001 is one of the most popular shonen manga series of all time, with over 120 million copies in circulation globally. The series was once considered one of Weekly Shonen Jump's "Big Three," a title given to the three most popular anime and manga franchises of the time, alongside Eiichiro Oda's still on-going One Piece, and Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto. The original manga came to an end in 2016, though Kubo returned to its world in 2018 with the new series, Burn the Witch, which is set in the same universe but features a different cast of characters.

The Bleach manga is localized and distributed in English by VIZ Media. The anime series is available for streaming on Hulu, Netflix and Crunchyroll.

Source: Twitter