New Bleach Chapter Sets Up New Story Arc

The new one-shot Bleach chapter from series creator Tite Kubo was promoted as an epilogue to the original manga that ended five years ago, but fans of the series were hyped to discover that the new chapter actually seems to be setting up a new adventure for Ichigo and company.

The new manga chapter was published in the latest issue of Weekly Shonen Jump to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the original publication of Bleach. The chapter takes place after the 10-year time skip that happened at the end of the original Bleach series, and features an older Ichigo and Orihime, as well as their child, Kazui. The manga also features a return of many of the other surviving characters, including Rukia and Renji, as well as their child, Ichika. The chapter is 74-pages long and was released in English on VIZ Media's official Shonen Jump website.

SPOILERS FOR THE NEW CHAPTER OF BLEACH FOLLOW:

After showing what all the characters have been up to since the end of the original manga and introducing several new characters, the new Bleach chapter sees Ichigo and Renji traveling to the world of the living in order to perform a ceremony honoring the Soul Reaper captains who have died so far. Things go wrong, however, when their group is attacked by a group of powerful Hollows and Szayelaporro Granz, who returns from Hell and delivers some shocking revelations about the nature of the Soul Reapers' power and how it relates to the realm of Hell. The situation quickly spirals out of control and Ichigo and the rest of the Soul Reapers find themselves facing a brand new conflict.

While neither Tite Kubo or Weekly Shonen Jump have announced any other new Bleach projects at this time, the new chapter does seem to be prelude to a new story arc or a new manga series. Needless to say, fans are excited about the possibilities about this new story.

In addition to the new manga chapter, an art exhibition that celebrates Bleach's 20 year history will open in Tokyo later this year, and back in 2020 a new season of the anime was announced to be in development. The new season of the anime will adapt the chapters of the Bleach manga that were published after the TV series concluded in 2012.

Bleach was one of the most popular anime and manga franchises of the early '00s, and was considered one of Shonen Jump's "Big Three" series of the era, alongside Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto, which began a continuation of its own with the on-going Boruto sequel series; and Eiichiro Oda's long running One Piece. While Bleach has arguably not generated the lasting influence that those two franchises have, the amount of hype for the new chapter and the online buzz surrounding the story it appears to be setting up shows that there's still plenty of fans for Tite Kubo's shonen epic that are hungry for more.

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, Shonen Jump