Fist of the Blue Sky manga returns after 4+ year hiatus

Modified Nov 06, 2024 07:45 GMT

Fist of the Blue Sky manga returns after 4+ year hiatus (Image via Polygon Pictures)

Friday, October 25, 2024, saw illustrator Hideki Tsuji announce that the Fist of the Blue Sky manga would be returning from hiatus on November 25, 2024. The manga’s return will mark the conclusion of a hiatus that lasted four and a half years, with the hiatus beginning in May 2020. The news of the manga’s return came from Tsuji’s X account, confirming the manga’s return in the January 2025 issue of Coamix’s Monthly Comic Zenon magazine.

The last update on the Fist of the Blue Sky manga came over a year ago, at which time Tsuji reported that all remaining chapters had their layouts drafted aside from the final two. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the manga only has two chapters left to publish, but rather that preliminary work on all remaining chapters but the final two has been completed.

Fist of the Blue Sky manga’s return seems set to begin the march towards its ultimate conclusion

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Likewise, this would suggest that the Fist of the Blue Sky manga will be regularly serialized until at least the penultimate issues. While this wasn’t officially confirmed by Tsuji or any other relevant parties, the context of the manga’s last update prior to its return heavily suggests this. However, it is nevertheless a speculative claim as of this article’s writing. Fans can expect any additional breaks or hiatuses to be shared via Tsuji’s X account.

However, at the very least fans can expect the manga to be regularly serialized for quite some time, again via considering Tsuji’s most recent update prior to this latest one. Especially with the manga so close to its conclusion per this update, it wouldn’t make sense to return from a four-plus-year-long hiatus to go back onto one soon thereafter. While also speculative, this is a much safer presumption than the above.

The Fist of the Blue Sky manga first began in the debut issue of Shinchosha’s Weekly Comic Brunch magazine in May 2001. The series ran there until the magazine’s publication ceased in August 2010. The series was written by Buronson and Nobuhiko Horie and illustrated by Tetsuo Hara. Buronson and Hara are the creative duo behind the Fist of the North Star manga, which Blue Sky is a sequel to.

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Tsuji’s manga continues the original series and is suffixed with the title Regenesis to differentiate it from the original series. Tsuji provides the art, while Hiroyuki Yatsu writes the story. The manga shipped its fourth compilation volume in Japan in February 2020, shortly before announcing its aforementioned May 2020 hiatus. The series has also been adapted into an anime, with two seasons debuting on the Amazon Prime Video service in 2018.