Hunter x Hunter manga production resumes after three-year-plus hiatus, artist reveals

Creator Yoshihiro Togashi unceremoniously joins Twitter, instantly blows the network’s mind.

Ordinarily, a manga artist posting a photo of manga that they’re drawing shouldn’t be too shocking. After all, drawing manga is what makes them a manga artist, right?

Photo evidence of “Hey, look everyone, I’m drawing manga!” is a shocker, though, when it’s coming from Yoshihiro Togashi, the creator of Hunter x Hunter.

▼ “Four more chapters to go for now,” tweets Togashi.

There’s no greater test of patience in the anime/manga world than being a fan of Hunter x Hunter. The still-ongoing series debuted in March of 1988, and currently has 390 published chapters. But while 34 years and nearly 400 chapters are both impressive signs of longevity, the numbers start to feel out of whack when you remember that Hunter x Hunter runs in Weekly Shonen Jump. Generally, Japan’s weekly manga magazines take an issue off three times a year, for the holiday periods at New Year’s, Golden Week (in the spring), and Obon (in the summer). That still works out to 49 issues a year, though, and at that pace Hunter x Hunter should have hit chapter 390 more than two decades ago, in the spring of 1996.

The explanation is that Hunter x Hunter creator Yoshihiro Togashi is notorious for taking extremely long breaks from the series, which has gone on extended hiatus multiple times. The most recent collected volume, Volume 36, hit stores in Japan in October of 2018, and the series went into hiatus a month later, a hiatus that it’s yet to come out of.

So Togashi picking up his pen again is a very big deal, evidenced by the 1.1 million likes the tweet has earned so far…but yet also a little hard to believe. Adding to the skepticism some fans felt towards the announcement is that Togashi has never had a public Twitter account, and the “Four more chapters to go for now,” tweet is the first from the account that posted it. And while the Twitter name for the account, 冨樫義博, does match the kanji for Togashi’s name, the handle, @Un4v5s8bgsVk9Xp, sounds pretty random and shady. Could the tweet be the work of an imposter who’s just claiming to be Togashi in order to give fans false hope and laugh from the shadows at their upcoming disappointment?

Thankfully, the answer is no, and we owe this sense of security to none other than Yusuke Murata, artist for One Punch Man and Eyeshield 21, who tweeted a confirmation that the @Un4v5s8bgsVk9Xp account is indeed that of his colleague Yoshihiro Togashi.

▼ “This is really him,” says Murata, who sadly didn’t create another piece of god-tier artwork to mark this momentous occasion.

Now, if we take “Four more chapters to go for now” to mean that the new chapters won’t be published until Togashi finishes four more, we might still be in for a bit of a wait, given the speed with which he works. Still, for Hunter x Hunter, anything faster than a complete production standstill feels like a breakneck pace, and thus a reason to celebrate.

Source: Twitter/@Un4v5s8bgsVk9Xp
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at 06:13

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