When Tite Kubo discovered Saint Seiya in elementary school, he knew he wanted to create manga when he grew up. And it didn’t take him long to achieve that goal. At 19, Weekly Shōnen Jump published one of his one-shots. Three years later in 1999, his series Zombiepowder ran in Jump, though it only lasted 27 issues.
After Zombiepowder was cancelled, Kubo submitted his concept for Bleach, but Jump rejected it. Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball saw the concept, though, and he wrote Kubo a quick letter of encouragement. Kubo tried to pitch Bleach again, and this time it was accepted, debuting in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 2001.
The youngest of the Big 3 is a bit removed from the others in terms of tone and setting. Bleach protagonist Ichigo Kurosaki is a hot-headed high schooler with the ability to see ghosts. This has mostly proven a mild inconvenience until he runs into a restless and powerful evil spirit called a Hollow. Rukia Kuchiki, a Soul Reaper, is wounded defending him, and she offers a bit of her power to him so he can continue the fight. Ichigo, being spiritually gifted already, accidentally absorbs all her power. Complications ensue and at first it seems we’re in for an action comedy fighting spirit world baddies in an urban setting.
But Rukia and Ichigo soon find themselves in deeper water than anticipated. Rukia is a member of the Soul Society, a strictly organized, hierarchy of Soul Reapers whose mission is to shepherd the recently dead to the afterlife and destroy the dangerous Hollows. Rukia has broken the law by sharing her power and knowledge with a regular human, and she is sentenced to death. Ichigo and his gang of supernaturally gifted high schoolers embark on a mission to the Soul Society to save their friend. And things just get more complicated from there.
In 2004, Bleach would gain an anime adaptation by Studio Pierrot that ran until 2012. The anime ran for 366 episodes and four movies. The manga filled 74 volumes before it too came to a close in 2016. Viz Media brought both to the U.S. where Bleach ran on Adult Swim and later Toonami from 2006 until 2014 (with brief hiatuses to allow for episodes to be dubbed in advance).
The strength of Kubo’s world is his character designs, which we’ve discussed before. I spent 852 words talking about Kubo’s addiction to creating new characters in the fourth post of this challenge. Kubo has admitted before that he’d like to design clothes, and most of his characters (barring a small handful of more extreme designs) tend to look and dress like models.
Kubo also excels at creating unique and interesting powers, though they can get out of control. His worldbuilding tends to feel like the worldbuilding for an RPG with different races and classes blending together to give a few base powers lots of variation.
But while still massively popular, Bleach is probably the least loved of Jump’s Big 3. Like Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, Kubo initially planned for Bleach to last five years. While Oda’s story seems to grow with the telling, Kubo’s seemed to stretch itself thinner as time went on. The anime is often lambasted for filler arcs, while both anime and manga have been criticized for bare backgrounds and unnecessary fights. What eventually ended the manga, though, didn’t have to do with fans turning on the series.
By 2012, conflicts with his editors and his own failing health signaled that it was time to wrap up the story. Bleach entered its final arc, which would take four years to resolve, but after 686 chapters, the story ended in August 2016. Some of its plot threads were tied up in two light novels, one by Narita Ryohgo and the other by Kubo with Makoto Matsubara.
Bleach received a live action adaptation that released just three weeks ago, and around the same time Kubo released his first manga since the end of Bleach. Burn the Witch ran as a one-shot in Weekly Shōnen Jump and takes place in the same universe as Bleach.
That wraps up my posts on Weekly Shōnen Jump and its Big 3 titles. It’s strange to think that I’m nearly two months removed from the first time I talked about Bleach, but it’s only five and half weeks until the convention that warranted this challenge. The next few posts are likely to be fairly lightweight as I prep for the big push to the end, but I’m looking forward to the things I’ve got planned. Until tomorrow!
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