Atsushi Ohkubo announced that he has submitted the final chapter of Fire Force to his editors.
Ohkubo revealed on his personal Twitter account that he has already turned in the last part of what may be the final manga of his career. "The final episode has just been submitted," Ohkubo wrote, adding, "I still have a lot of work to do." An official end date for the series has yet to be announced, but Ohkubo has been teasing the Fire Force's finale since 2020, when he announced that the manga would be his final work, as the 42-year old artist plans to retire once the series is complete. In October, it was announced that the manga had begun its final arc, and in early in January, Ohkubo revealed during a Dark Souls livestream that there was about two volumes of content left to be published.
ちょうど今、最終話の入稿が終わりました。まだいろいろ仕事は残ってるけどね
— 大久保篤/Atsushi Ohkubo (@Atsushi_Ohkubo) January 25, 2022
Fire Force is set in a world that was struck by The Great Cataclysm, an apocalyptic event in which the world was hit with a massive outburst of fire and rendered mostly uninhabitable. 250 years later, humanity has begun to recover but is now threatened by the appearance of the Infernals, people who been transformed into fire-spreading monsters. Humanity's only line of defense against these fiery beasts are the titular Fire Force, a group of pyro-kinetic soldiers who literally fight fire with fire. The series focuses on Shinra Kusakabe, a new recruit in the Fire Force who can cause flames to erupt from his feet, as he battles the Infernals and begins to unravel the connections between the monsters, a mysterious cult and his own past.
In 2019, Fire Force became the latest of Ohkubo's works to be turned into an anime series. The show was produced by David Production, the animation studio behind the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure anime and the upcoming new adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi's (Ranma 1/2, Inuyasha) pioneering sci-fi rom-com, Urusei Yatsura. The anime was well-received and aired a second season in 2020. While the show has yet to adapt the further chapters of Ohkubo's manga, a third season for the show has not been announced at this time.
In addition to Fire Force, Ohkubo is known for his original manga series, B.Ichi, which was first published in 2001, and his most well known and commercially successful hit, Soul Eater. The latter title was serialized from 2004 - 2013 and has a circulation of almost 20 million copies worldwide. Soul Eater received a spinoff series, Soul Eater Not! in 2014, which was also written and drawn by Ohkubo.
Both seasons of the Fire Force anime series are available for streaming on Hulu, Funimation and Crunchyroll. The manga is currently being localized into English and is distributed in North America by Kodansha USA.
Source: Twitter
