Bleach

Bleach (BLEACH) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Tite Kubo. It follows the adventures of the hotheaded teenager Ichigo Kurosaki, who inherits his parents’ destiny after he obtains the powers of a Soul Reaper—a death personification similar to the Grim Reaper—from another Soul Reaper, Rukia Kuchiki. His newfound powers force him to take on the duties of defending humans from evil spirits and guiding departed souls to the afterlife and set him on journeys to various ghostly realms of existence.

Bleach was serialized in Shueisha’s shōnen (teenage males) manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump from August 2001 to August 2016, with its chapters collected in seventy-four tankōbon volumes. The series has spawned a media franchise that includes an anime television series adaptation that Tokyo-based studio Pierrot produced from 2004 to 2012, two original video animation (OVA) episodes, four animated feature films, ten stage musicals, and numerous video games, as well as many types of Bleach-related merchandise. A Japanese live-action film adaptation produced by Warner Bros. was released in 2018.

In North America, the manga was licensed for English release by Viz Media in 2004. They released its seventy-four volumes and published its chapters in their Shonen Jump magazine from November 2007 until its final issue in April 2012.