‘Bleach’ Creator Shares New Look at Ichigo

Shueisha has been celebrating a successful 50 years of Weekly Shonen Jump, and has enlisted many of its authors to share sketches in celebration. One such sketch is from Bleach‘s Tite Kubo, who shares a new sketch of Ichigo.

It’s been a while since Kubo has shared a new sketch of Ichigo, so this is definitely a nice sight to see.

This new Ichigo sketch comes as part of the special exhibit, running from July 17 until September 30 in Japan, featuring series which made their mark or had a substantial run in the 2000s such as Bleach, Naruto, Haikyu!!, Gintama, Eyeshield 21, The Prince of Tennis, Hunter x Hunter, Assassination Classroom, Hikaru no Go, D. Gray Man, Death Note and more.

Many of the current anime fans have been shaped and molded by the series of this decade specifically. Many fans have ties to series of the 90, but the series of the 2000s had the benefit of the Internet age as the expansion of fansubs and ability to share more than just a few VCR fan video tapes between a few people. Communities became a big part of the anime fandom as major series like Bleach made major headway in the West on television and online.

The upcoming Bleach live-action film has released its first full trailer, along with two other new ones released at the same time. The movie will adapt the first arc of the series, the “Substitute Shinigami” arc. Early reactions to the film have been positive overall, with there talk of even being a new trilogy of films adapting more of Bleach‘s material. If this is successful, then a sequel film with the Soul Society is definitely on the horizon.

The confirmed cast includes Sota Fukushi as Ichigo Kurosaki and Hana Sugisaki as Rukia Kuchiki, MIYAVI as Byakuya Kuchiki, Ryou Yoshizawa, as Uryuu Ishida, Taichi Saotome as Renji Abarai, Erina Mano as Orihime Inoue, Tomo Koyanagi as Chad Yasutora, Yosuke Egochi as Isshin Kurosaki, Masami Nagasawa as Masaki Kurosaki, and Seiichi Tanabe as Keisuke Urahara.

For those unfamiliar with Tite Kubo‘s Bleach, the series follows the young delinquent Ichigo Kurosaki, who had the ability to see spirits. He soon obtains the power of a Soul Reaper – one meant to usher lost souls to the afterlife – and now has the duty to defend the living world from monstrous dark spirits known as Hollows.

The manga was serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump from 2001 to 2016, and was collected into 74 volumes. It has been adapted into English thanks to VIZ Media, and has sold over 900 million copies in Japan. The series was adapted into an anime by Studio Pierrot from 2004 to 2012, and has four feature-length animations, rock musicals, video games, and a ton of other merchandise. The English language broadcast premiered on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block in 2006, and you currently find the Japanese and English language versions now streaming on Hulu.