The new chapter of Bleach from series creator Tite Kubo is now available to read on VIZ's English Shonen Jump website.
The new 74-page manga chapter was released to the English Shonen Jump website on Aug. 9. The new chapter continues on after the timeskip seen in the final chapter of the main Bleach manga series, and features an older Ichigo, Orihime, and their child, Kazui. The new story is the first chapter of the Bleach manga to be published since 2016, and is being released to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the original publication of Kubo's shonen epic, which debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump on Aug. 7, 2001. While the manga is being treated as a one-shot, the story does appear to set the stage for a new adventure for Ichigo and his fellow Soul Reapers.
Bleach tells the story of Ichigo, a young man with a supernatural awareness of ghosts, who gets drawn into the conflict between the Hollows, a race of malicious spirits, and the Soul Reapers, a group of powerful warriors who protect humanity and the spirits of the recently departed from the Hollows. After a chance encounter with the skilled warrior Rukia, Ichigo becomes a Soul Reaper himself, and has to learn to hone his skills in order to fight not just the Hollows, but also corruption within the ranks of the Soul Reapers.
Bleach is one of the most popular shonen manga series of all time, and was once considered one of Weekly Shonen Jump's "Big Three," alongside Eiichiro Oda's still on-going One Piece, and Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto. The series was adapted into an anime series that ran from 2004-2012. In 2020, it was announced that a new season of the anime was in production and would adapt the later chapters of the manga that were published after the original anime series ended.
The new chapter was originally announced earlier in July, and was published in Japanese with the release of Weekly Shonen Jump Issue #36/37. While the main Bleach manga ended in 2016, Kubo has returned to the series frequently: his most recent manga series, Burn the Witch, is set within the same world as Bleach, and earlier this year the manga author released a new illustration of series antagonist Aizen to help promote the release of Disney+'s Loki miniseries 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: VIZ Media
