gege akutami new manga

Gege Akutami’s Next Manga: The Planet Holds Its Breath While Shōnen Jump’s C-suite Holds Its Wallet
By Dave’s Locker International Desk

When Shūeisha confirmed last night that Gege Akutami’s follow-up to *Jujutsu Kaisen* will debut “after a short break,” global markets reacted with the kind of cool rationality usually reserved for crypto booms or North Korean press releases. The Nikkei’s manga-adjacent stocks ticked up 2.3 percent, a German paper ran the headline “DER NEUE TEUFEL VON TOKIO,” and in Mexico City a street vendor began pre-selling bootleg keychains of a character who literally does not exist yet. Humanity, in short, is once again outsourcing its serotonin production to a 33-year-old from Iwate who draws demons prettier than most of us brush our teeth.

The stakes, however, are planetary. *Jujutsu Kaisen* sold over 90 million copies in four years, a figure that surpasses the population of Germany and roughly equals the number of times the phrase “supply-chain disruption” has been muttered since 2020. It has been translated into 22 languages, including Catalan, whose speakers now know how to curse in cursed energy. Streaming rights minted yen from São Paulo to Saskatchewan; Crunchyroll’s servers still bear the scorch marks of the Shibuya Incident simul-drop. In short, Akutami-sensei has already weaponized teenage nihilism more effectively than TikTok, and the encore is coming.

Diplomats are, of course, pretending to be above the fray. France’s Ministry of Culture issued a bland statement about “supporting sequential art in all its diversity,” which is bureaucratese for “we will once again clear shelf space in every FNAC from Lille to Cayenne.” Meanwhile, South Korea’s webtoon giants have accelerated production on “counter-programming”—a euphemism for panic-drawing pale imitations with extra abs. Even the Vatican’s social-media team posted a cryptic image of St. Michael with black flashes around the edges; whether this is cosplay or shade remains unclear.

Industry analysts—those tireless souls who treat cartoons like OPEC futures—predict the new series will need to top 500,000 copies per volume just to break even against JJK’s legacy. That’s half a million units of paper and glue, or, for the environmentally conscious, enough trees to re-forest a small Baltic state. Sustainability advocates have already begun sharpening their hashtags, but let’s be honest: when the choice is between carbon offsets and seeing what fresh trauma Akutami inflicts on grade-schoolers, Mother Earth loses every time.

The geopolitical subplot is richer than Sukuna’s finger collection. China’s censors are pre-emptively squinting at early drafts, trying to decide whether the inevitable gore counts as “spiritual pollution” or merely “Tuesday.” U.S. retailers, still haunted by last year’s manga-paper shortage (remember when toilet paper got all the headlines?), have quietly booked extra freight containers for Fall 2025, because nothing says “land of the free” like supply-side logistics for imaginary sorcerers. And somewhere in a London think-tank, a junior fellow is drafting a white paper titled “Soft Power and Soft Cover: Manga as 21st-Century Cultural Imperialism,” blissfully unaware that nobody who actually reads the stuff uses the term “soft power” without giggling.

Akutami himself has offered only three words—“Please look forward”—which, translated from Japanese author-speak, means either “I’m fine” or “I’ve discovered new depths of sleep deprivation.” Rumor has it the new story swaps cursed energy for cursed finance, placing the action inside a sentient stock exchange where every bull run devours a soul. Satire, of course, until you realize Wall Street interns already call that “Thursday.”

The takeaway, dear reader, is that in a year when glaciers sulk, elections flirt with reality TV, and AI churns out prose flatter than week-old chūhai, planet Earth still agrees on one thing: lining up at midnight for a comic drawn by an insomniac who thinks happiness is a plot hole. If that’s not a testament to human resilience, it’s at least proof that we’ll happily doom-scroll our way to the apocalypse as long as the cliffhanger is juicy enough.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pre-order my non-existent keychain. The vendor says they glow in the dark—just like our collective future.