Bleach to Release New Chapter for 20th Anniversary

Five years after the last chapter was published, Shonen Jump's Bleach will return for a brand new chapter.

Shonen Jump News - Unofficial is reporting that Tite Kubo's supernatural-themed shonen epic will return with a completely new 73-page chapter. The new chapter of the series is being released in Weekly Shonen Jump Issue #36/37 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the original publication of Bleach, which premiered in 2001. No other details about the new chapter were given, such as story details, what characters will appear, and what time period it takes place in. The final chapter for Bleach was released in 2016, and featured a 10 year time-skip that introduced the children of several of the series' main characters.

Bleach tells the story of Ichigo Kurosaki, a young man who can see ghosts. Ichigo encounters a woman named Rukia, who is part of an organization known as the Soul Reapers, a group of warriors who are tasked with shepherding recently deceased souls to the afterlife and who also protect the living from the Hollows, monstrous lost souls that attack humans. Ichigo is eventually recruited into the Soul Reapers himself, and is forced into further conflicts with the Hollows, corrupt members of the Soul Reapers, and other supernatural foes.

Bleach was considered one of Shonen Jump's "Big Three" franchises in the early '00s, alongside Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto and Eiichiro Oda's still on-going One Piece. The manga had a circulation of over 120 million copies worldwide, and was adapted into an anime series in 2004 that ran for eight years. In 2020, it was announced that the anime series would come back for an additional season to adapt the remaining chapters of Kubo's manga. The series was also adapted into a series of video games by Sega and was turned into a live-action movie in 2018 by Warner Bros. Japan.

Since the completion of the Bleach manga in 2016, creator Tite Kubo has worked on a number of different projects. Kubo released a new manga series, Burn the Witch, in 2020. Burn the Witch takes place in the same universe as Bleach but is set in England rather than Japan. Kubo once again teamed up with Sega in 2019 to provide character designs for the latest entry in the video game publisher's Sakura Wars series. The manga creator also recently released a new illustration of one of Bleach's most famous antagonists, Aizen, to promote the release of Disney+'s Loki series in Japan.

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