Kagurabachi Is Finally Getting An Anime, And Next Is These New-Gen Shonen Jump Hits
Three years after becoming Shonen Jump’s next big hit, Kagurabachi is finally getting an anime, and it looks as amazing as fans hoped. With CyPic in charge of the animation and veteran action director Tetsuya Takeuchi, best known for his work on Naruto and for directing From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad’s Been Reincarnated!, at the helm, Kagurabachi has everything it needs to be a generational hit, and if Kagurabachi’s teaser trailer is a sign, even that might be an understatement.
Kagurabachi’s anime won’t come out until April 2027, following some early premieres throughout the next year, and when it does, it’s bound to bring about the renewal in popularity and prestige for Shonen Jump that the magazine has desperately needed since My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen ended in 2024. Ideally, though, it won’t just be Kagurabachi that Shonen Jump bets on; plenty of other Shonen Jump manga are primed for high-quality anime, and if two manga in particular got similar treatment as Kagurabachi, it would be a new era for Shonen Jump in the best of ways.
Why These Shonen Jump Manga Need Anime After Kagurabachi
Out of all the manga in Shonen Jump’s current lineup, the stories that need to get anime after Kagurabachi are, without a doubt, Ichi the Witch and Shinobi Undercover. Both manga are new-gen stories that started roughly a year after Kagurabachi, and, both critically and financially, they’ve quickly become two of the new-gen Shonen Jump manga held in the highest regard, with Ichi the Witch, specifically, even regarded as a duo alongside Kagurabachi in terms of popularity.
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Naturally, both stories have more than earned that level of praise. For Shinobi Undercover, series creators Ippon Takegushi and Santa Mitarashi were only known for the largely forgettable Candy Flurry, so there wasn’t much reason to get excited about it. Surprisingly, though, not only does Shinobi Undercover have an amazing grasp of comedy and character drama, but like Kagurabachi, the series boasts some truly amazing fight choreography centered around a unique and thoroughly detailed ninja-based power system, making Shinobi Undercover the closest thing to a modern-day Naruto. As for why Ichi the Witch is great, being the creation of Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun writer Osamu Nishi and Act-age artist Shiro Usazaki drew a lot of hype, and it’s more than lived up to it. Not only is the artwork consistently gorgeous, but it’s all perfectly balanced out by great action, stellar worldbuilding, a fun magic system, and characters that are always fun to watch and only get better with time. If Kagurabachi and Shinobi Undercover succeed as action stories, then Ichi the Witch excels as an adventure story, and it only gets better with every arc.
Does Shonen Jump Officially Have A New Big 3?
Shonen New-Gen Big Three Kagurabachi Ichi the Witch and Shinobi Undercover
Ichi the Witch and Shinobi Undercover are probably the Shonen Jump manga that most deserve anime after Kagurabachi, and that begs the question of how the anime community should view them. All three manga are the Shonen Jump stories that have been getting the most attention from fans and critics, and the fact that it’s specifically three manga naturally invites the idea of them becoming Shonen Jump’s new Big 3 in the same vein as One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach. Naturally, none of those manga have come anywhere close to the heights of the Big 3, but even so, the idea might not be all that presumptuous. All three of them have been doing incredibly well with just their manga, and with modern anime’s mainstream popularity making the manga that inspires so many of them more popular than ever, a good anime adaptation is all they’d need to dominate the community. Manga like Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer exploding in popularity thanks to their anime is the ultimate proof of that, and there’s no reason that it couldn’t happen again. One of the best eras for Shonen Jump and anime as a whole was when One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach all ran together and served as the definitive faces of anime and manga worldwide, and with Kagurabachi, Ichi the Witch, and Shinobi Undercover all being popular with old and new fans alike for similar reasons, it’s easy to see them as bringing about a return of that era of Shonen Jump. All of that is hypothetical, of course, but at this point, it would be stranger if something like that didn’t happen.
Shonen Jump's Future Has Never Looked Better
Kagurabachi-Teaser-Chihiro
As previously discussed, Shonen Jump is currently in an incredibly rough spot. In addition to losing My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen, Sakamoto Days and Blue Box are both ending soon, One Piece is ending within the next few years, and 2025 was a terrible year for Shonen Jump, due to only Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo and Someone Hertz becoming hits. As things stand, it won’t be long before Shonen Jump runs out of worthwhile manga, a situation that hasn’t been entertained since losing Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk brought readership to an all-time low in the late 90s.
Fortunately, there’s finally reason to be optimistic about Shonen Jump’s future; Kagurabachi’s anime is bound to make the series more popular than ever, especially with how great the teaser trailer looks, and Ichi the Witch and Shinobi Undercover, being as notable as they are, would perfectly go along with that if they also received anime adaptations. All of that would do wonders to make Shonen Jump bigger than ever and make up for the loss of so many hit manga, and it might be happening sooner than people think.
Shonen Jump is in a position where it desperately needs something new to draw in fans, and whether by coincidence or by design, it might have found just that not only in Kagurabachi, but in Ichi the Witch and Shinobi Undercover, as well. All three manga perfectly encapsulate the essence of Shonen Jump manga with their thrilling action, gorgeous artwork, and fun casts of heroes and villains to round it all out, and so long as Kagurabachi isn’t the only one getting an anime, there’s no reason why all three can’t become the new pillars of Shonen Jump in time.
