Wind Breaker manga starts accelerated English release in July 2025

Modified Jan 09, 2025 21:05 GMT

Wind Breaker manga starts accelerated English release in July 2025 (Image via CloverWorks)

Thursday, January 9, 2025 saw Kodansha USA Publishing officially announce its intent to accelerate the English release schedule of the Wind Breaker manga series. More specifically, this accelerated schedule will start in July with the English release of the tenth compilation volume of mangaka Satoru Nii’s beloved original series.

Once the tenth volume of the Wind Breaker manga is released in July, the series will receive monthly print releases, presumably until it is caught up with the Japanese release. Likewise, it’s also presumed that once the English release catches up to the Japanese, each Japanese release will be quickly translated into and officially released in English.

Wind Breaker manga’s English release set to quickly catch up to the Japanese with newly announced schedule

Expand Tweet

As of this article’s writing, the Wind Breaker manga currently has 20 volumes released in Japanese, with eight of these having been translated into English. The ninth volume will be released in English by Kodansha USA Publishing on Tuesday, February 4, 2025. As mentioned above, the tenth will follow after some time in July 2025. However, once the tenth is released in English, the accelerated schedule will begin and bring with it an interesting scenario.

Once July 2025 hits and the tenth volume is officially released and the monthly release schedule begins, the series should be fully caught up to the Japanese release by the end of 2026. Historically, the series has released compilation volumes every two to three months, with 20 volumes currently released. The English translation should release its 20th volume in May 2026 given this new accelerated schedule.

While it may take a couple of years, the English release should eventually run out of backlog to catch up onto the Japanese with. If the series is still ongoing by this point, then the most logical assumption is that the English translation of each volume would be released before the next Japanese one ships. However, this is purely speculative, with Kodansha USA Publishing not touching on this aspect of the new schedule in their announcement.

Expand Tweet

Kodansha USA Publishing has been releasing the manga digitally in English since Spring 2022, but only recently began publishing the manga in print. Print publications began in August 2023, which was in the middle of the promotional cycle for CloverWorks’ television anime adaptation of the series. Likewise, the anime has inflated the series’ popularity to incredible heights, which also likely played a role in the aforementioned coming accelerated English release schedule.

Nii’s Wind Breaker manga began serialization on Kodansha’s Magazine Pocket website platform in January 2021, where it is still ongoing today. The series has 167 chapters currently released, with 160 of them collected into 20 total compilation volumes. A second season of CloverWorks’ anime has been announced, and will premiere in April 2025.