Watch the Gachiakuta season two first-look trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQWAROhiRe0
Good news for anyone who has spent the autumn refreshing K Manga like a Victorian waiting for the second post: Gachiakuta is coming back. Kei Urana announced on X on Thursday that her manga will return from hiatus on 11 November in Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine, and she shared a new illustration to prove she hasn’t spent the break entirely on the sofa.
It has been a long wait by weekly standards. The last new chapter, number 173, appeared in the magazine’s combined issue that shipped on 5 August, and every issue since has listed the series as resting so that its author could carry out research. On 8 September, Kodansha confirmed the hiatus would continue and promised to name a return date once one had been agreed with Urana. This is the series’ second break of the year, following a seven-week pause after chapter 162.5 back in February. Fandom, ever the model of patience and restraint, had declared the whole thing cancelled well before the first month was out.
For those who have yet to take the plunge, Gachiakuta is one of the more inventive shonen hits of recent years. Rudo is a boy from the slums of a floating city whose wealthy citizens simply tip their rubbish over the edge. Framed for murder, he gets tipped over with it, landing in the Pit, where the waste of humanity has bred monstrous trash beasts. There he falls in with the Cleaners, who fight using Vital Instruments: ordinary objects charged with power by the care their owners lavished on them. Throw in Hideyoshi Andou’s graffiti designs and Urana’s scratchy, kinetic linework, which owes an evident debt to her old mentor Atsushi Ohkubo of Soul Eater and Fire Force, and you have a manga that looks like nothing else on the newsagent’s shelf. The only British precedent for heroes living off other people’s discarded junk is the Wombles, and Great Uncle Bulgaria never had to fight anything nastier than a litter lout.
The research line is not just a polite publishing euphemism, either. Urana has form for taking reference seriously, including photographing herself to work out how a body should move on the page. Quite what one researches for a manga set in a hell of discarded rubbish is anyone’s guess, although a fortnight at a council recycling centre in Swindon would probably cover most of it. Here at SFcrowsnest we would happily read the travelogue.
The timing is handy for the franchise. The anime adaptation from Bones Film ran for 24 episodes in 2025 and topped Crunchyroll’s viewing charts for its debut season, and a second season is in production, with a brief first-look trailer released in July after screenings at Anime Expo. There is still no broadcast date for that, so the manga’s return gives readers something to chew on in the meantime. Kodansha published the 19th collected volume in Japan in July, and Kodansha USA continues to put the series out in English.
Weekly manga is a punishing trade, with something like nineteen finished pages expected every seven days. Even Tharg’s droids at 2000 AD get the occasional week off. Three months away from the drawing board seems the least the industry owes Urana. The bins, after all, will still be there when she gets back.
Join the conversation (0)