Welcome fanatics! Welcome to the first News Jumble of June! I feel like renaming it to the News Juneble for the month…No? Yeah, I totally didn’t think that was a good idea either. Anyways, this past week I have managed to scrap together news ranging from the new, upcoming anime series Adult Swim will be airing, to Final Fantasy V! So, sit back, relax, and enjoy!

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Aniplex of America announced last weekend at FanimeCon that the Durarara!! anime series will begin airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block later this month. The 26-episode series will run on Saturdays, and will also be streamable on the Adult Swim website. The show was simulcast by Crunchyroll this past fall, and has since been dubbed by Aniplex, with the first two parts of the series already being released on DVD. The third and final part will ship later this month.

Fuyumi Ono and Ryu Fujisaki ended their Shiki horror manga this past week in the July issue of Shueisha’s Jump Square magazine. The series has been running since 1998, and has a total of 11 volumes with about 2.2 million copies of the manga having been printed. The series also inspired an anime adaptation, which aired last year, and was simulcast by Funimation, who also plans to release the dubbed version of the series on DVD and Blu-ray in the spring of next year.

Capsule toy makers, Kitan Club, announced that they will be offering Hello Kitty Zombie Friends mascots later this September. Aside from a zombified Hello Kitty, there will also be zombified versions of Fifi, Mimmy, Joey and Mory, Tippy, and Tracy. The little figures will be available via random lots featuring capsule dispensing machines for about 300 yen, ($3.70). I haven’t used a toy capsule machine in years…I remember begging my mother for money to buy junk…Oh the days when that was acceptable by society…

North American comic publisher Cryptozoic Entertainment recently listed the comic series Warcraft: Legends on their website. The title, based on Blizzard’s popular Warcraft franchise, (no surprise Jubi is reporting it), was originally published by Tokyopop, which shut down operations in its North American branch earlier this week. Cryptozoic also listed that they re-released the first volume of the series on their digital store for iOS mobile devices. Jaina Proudmoore pic related for awesomeness!

As we are approaching E3, video game news is ramping up quite a bit…so I must report on as much as I can! An early trailer release from Namco Bandai, which can be viewed here, shows off the new Soul Calibur V. More of this game will be revealed at E3, but this is the official trailer for the expo, (not really sure why it was released a bit early, but heck yeah for us!). Thoughts? Sophitia looks awesome as usual…I hope there is a certain Seung Mina behind the scenes though.

As we know, Final Fantasy XIII is getting an upcoming sequel in Final Fantasy XIII-2, and as we can guess, the game will be displayed at E3 coming up soon. However, Gamespot.com got hold of the official trailer early, which I will link you to here! The Expo starts on Tuesday…but I just know there are some who can’t wait to see more of it!

Team Ico announced earlier this week that their HD remakes of their classic Shadow of the Colossus and ICO titles will be released in Japan by this fall. September 22nd to be exact. The games will be released individually, but also be bundled together in a pack set that will also include a 100 page book. Individually, the games will cost about $49.50 apiece, and the bundle will cost about $87.00. Pretty pricey…but they will be so pretty. I’m sure we will see these released not too much longer after they are out in Japan.

At a press event earlier this week, Konami had a slew of announcements involving their Silent Hill horror franchise. Besides revealing the Silent Hill: HD Collection and Silent Hill: Downpour, they also announced that they are working on an entirely new installment to the series, Silent Hill: Book of Memories. Sadly, all we know at this point is that the game will be for the NGP from Sony so…Hopefully we will get more info at E3!

Nintendo revealed earlier this week that the first Pokemon game for the Nintendo 3DS would be available sometime next week. The game, titled Pokedex 3D, will be available on the eShop. In the game, players will start with 16 Pokemon, and will be able to gain more via the StreetPass, online via the Spot Pass, or through QR codes. Oh…and I forgot to mention…The game will be a free download. Someone with a 3DS check it out and report to me asap!

In Mortal Kombat news, (which is apparently becoming weekly again…or did it ever really stop being weekly?), a new trailer showing off Skarlet was released this past week. Avid readers will know I talked about the announcement that she would be coming in a DLC, (of which we still do not know the date), but from this trailer, we do know that she will be shown off heavily at E3. Also, leave it to them to change the spelling of her name. I will like the trailer here, but be warned…she is a blood ninja…and she likes her blood…a lot. She can stay.

THQ announced alongside the WWE earlier this week that their next video game collaboration will not be a continuation of the Smackdown vs. Raw franchise. Instead, the new game will be called WWE’12, (which I guess means the WWE games from now on will just be named after the corporation and the year tacked on). There will also be a few new features added, such as a fatigue system. When wrestling other people, you can pinpoint parts of their body, (like in real life), forcing them to adapt to the match without, let’s say, full use of their left leg, (if they are Kofi Kingston, it would probably be quite effective). There will also be new taunts, such as how Randy Orton spazzes out before he is about to use the RKO. They haven’t released any gameplay footage as of yet, but hopefully we will see some soon at E3! Also, The Miz pic related for Awesomeness.

Weekly readers may remember back a bit ago that a Final Fantasy V release for PSN was announced in Japan and Europe…but not North America. Well, we don’t have to worry about that anymore! Thanks to an ESRB listing for the game just recently, we now know that Final Fantasy V will be joining Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI on the North American PSN sometime very soon. An exact date was not given, but it is probably safe to assume it will be before the year’s end.

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So does it for yet another week, folks! I shall be back again next week, with a full Jumble of video game news from E3! I am going to have a busy week keeping up, but I promise to touch upon all of the things I deem highlightable, and present them easily for you! Until then though, I need to go shake my groove thing, yeah yeah.

Today, Shizuo goes swimming, Kenshin appears in two places at once, and L’Arc~en~Ciel world tour imminent.

Sources:
• Story 1
• Story 2
• Story 3

Hello Fanatics, and welcome back to the News Jumble! I am your host, Jubilee, and after a bit of a stray off the beaten path last week with my Co-op Pokemon review with DJ Christmas, we are returning to the norm. This week, however, we have news ranging from the usual Pokemon, to saving trees! I know you so excited… Cause I’m so excited. Let’s start partying, partying, YEAH!

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The Pokemon Global Link, the feature with which players can access one another’s Black City/White Forst, as well as the Dream World, was officially announced a further delay. It was expected to be up about a month after the game’s release, on March 30th, however, the delay is due to the recent earthquakes. We do not yet have an official set date for when it will be up, but I will make sure to let you all know.

Kodansha USA announced last Friday that they would begin publishing Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon manga and its two part prequel, Codename: Sailor V, starting later this September. The series has been out of print for six years in North America, and Codename: Sailor V has never before had an official English release. The new edition will feature new cover art, extensive bonus material from Takeuchi, and touched up interior artwork.

It was officially confirmed earlier this week that the American television premier of the Iron Man anime is set for this summer. The show had its premier at Comic-Con in San Diego last year, and a full episode premier of the dub is set for April 2nd, with both Marvel and MADHOUSE presenting. Iron Man will be aired on the television channel G4, (Yay.), and is expected to run through the whole summer season.

Earlier this week, Crunchyroll’s list of episodes it will be simulcasting during this Spring season was released. Although the titles do not yet have definite release plans or dates, it does give us a good idea what to expect.

Titles listed are:

• Blue Exorcist
• A Bridge to the Stars
• Deadman Wonderland
• Hana-Saku Iroha
• Lotte no Omocha
• Nichijou
• Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi
• Sket Dance
• Under the Innocent Sky
• A Channel
• AnoHana
• Dog Days

This month’s issue of Kadodawa Shoten’s Monthly Shonen Ace unveiled the news that Production I.G. and CLAMP are collaborating on a new original Blood anime, titled Blood-C. CLAMP will be handling the character designs and the story, and Production I.G. will focus on the animation. It is currently expected to be released sometime this July. Many of you may know the Blood franchise, which started with the Blood: The Last Vampire film, and later went on to inspire the Blood + television series, (which you might have seen on Adult Swim not to terribly far back). Gotta say, Jubi is looking especially forward to this!

Earlier this week, Funimation filed a notice of dismissal for the lawsuit they made earlier this year against 1,337 people who allegedly downloaded and distributed an episode of One Piece. All lawsuits against the remaining defendants were voluntarily dismissed by Funimation, however, Funimation also stated that “as a matter of law” they reserve the right to re-file the claims against any and or all of the defendants . Lay down the LAW!

Being announced later this month, (and by that, I mean it has of course been announced early), in Shogakukan’s Weekly Shonen Sunday will be more details on Hiromu Arakawa’s newest manga series. This will be Arakawa’s first new series after ending Fullmetal Alchemist last June. The new series will be titled Gin no Saji (Silver Spoon), and will premier in the magazine’s 19th issue on April 6th later this year. The story will be set in the northernmost Japanese prefecture of Hokkaido, in a high school. The manga will be featured on the front cover of its premier issue, and will also contain a special clear file to commemorate the new series. It will also run weekly, which is a first for Arakawa.

The Oxford University Press announced this past Thursday that the word “hentai” will be added to the Oxford English Dictionary in its latest update this year. “Hentai” will be joining the wide resource of words, along with others such as LOL and OMG. (Which aren’t really words, so I don’t know why they are considered as them).

Hentai: [hen’tie] noun. A subgenre of the Japanese genres of manga and anime, characterized by overtly sexualized characters and sexually explicit images and plots.

Origin: 1990s: Japanese, literally ‘abnormal, perverted.’

For you avid readers of the Jumble, you might remember a similar story to this, when “hikikomori” was added to the dictionary in the updated version last year. Also, “otaku” was added back in 2004. It is interesting to see words that are of complete Japanese origin making it into an English dictionary. If it works, use it I guess.

It was announced earlier this week that Namori’s Yuruyuri manga will be getting a television anime adaptation. This manga follows four schoolgirls who take over the former tea ceremony club room and turn it into their own amusement club. The new series will be directed by Masahiko Ohta, and the scripts will be supervised/written by Takashi Aoshima. No word on the exact release date has been announced, however, we can expect more information in the next issue of Ichijinsha’s Comic Yuri Hime.

It was announced earlier this week by Japanese developer Miracle Kidz that a new title, Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari 2, is currently in the works. Translated, the title is River City Ransom 2. Remember that old side scroller beat ‘em up on the NES? It is planned that the game will be hitting consoles, (presumably all of them), in Japan sometime later this Summer.

In our weekly Mortal Kombat news, a new trailer was released earlier this week. Want to guess who we get to see in it? Kratos! I have to say, some of his combos look just absolutely brutal, even for Mortal Kombat! Bringing swords things to a fist fight! Geez! Anyways, if you want to check out the trailer, you can do so here, but as always, viewer discretion is advised and such. The body limbs flying around…it gets things banned in Australia.

EA announced on Wednesday that they would be following in Ubisoft’s eco-friendly footseteps by ceasing the printing of the paper instruction manuals that are bundled with all video games. According to them, this will be a 40% reduction of printed materials for the company. It is planned for instructions to be available via the pause/main menus and by download on places such as EA.com. Saving plants, it is a good thing people!

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And so does it for another week! As always though, Jubi will return yet again in a week’s time with a whole new bag of goodies! I hope you had fun partyin, partyin with me this week, and if you have and questions or comments, the section for those is just below! I have a question for you though Fanatics… Which seat can I take?

O hai Mark! Welcome to another edition of the one and only News Jumble, hosted by me, Jubilee! Here’s to hoping that the week was fantastic for you all! Jubilee has gone back to classes, but that hasn’t stopped him from summoning twelve news stories in one turn! This week, we have everything from figurine follies, to Square Enix cubed. Now then…let’s rev it up! Yeah, I don’t like that one as much either…let’s just kick it into overdrive again.

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This past Thursday, two men, Jun Fujita and Keiichi Ito, were arrested on charges of violating Japan’s Copyright Act. The two allegedly modified a Kamen Rider W figure and attempted to auction it online. Thus, since the two did this without permission from Toei Animation, the copyright owners of the series, several laws were broken and the men were brought in. The final auction for the figurine was 269,001 yen ($3,300).

This past Friday, the judging committee for the 56th annual Shogakukan Manga Awards announced the winners for this year’s contest. There were four sections of manga: girls’, boys’, children’s, and general. The winner of the Girls’ section was Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chamber. For Boys’, it was Ken Sasaki’s King Golf. In the Children’s section, the winner was Natsumi Matsumoto’s Yumeiro Patissiere. The General category sported two winners, Chuya Koyama’s Uchu Kyodai and Shohei Manabe’s Ushijima the Loan Shark. Winners are invited to ceremony on March 3rd at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, as well as receiving 1 million yen and a bronze statuette.

The Beezelbub anime series official website recently announced that the first series DVD, shipping on April 20th, will include a special video short titled Hashire! Beru-bo Keiji!!. The DVD will also include the first two episodes of the series and a special decorative sticker. This series is currently being simulcast on Crunchyroll…and I am quite curious if anyone is keeping up with it? It looked pretty entertaining, and I have been considering it for a while.

Section23, the North American anime distributor, announced earlier this week that the Blu-ray Edition of Guin Saga scheduled for March 29th has been postponed indefinitely. The company lists their reasoning for delay as “circumstances beyond their control,” but provided no further information. The DVD collection set for release on the 29th of March as well remain unaffected by whatever the issue is, but as of now, Section23 has gone so far as to request that retailers delete the Blu-Ray Edition from their databases.

Anime licensing company, Sentai Filmworks, alongside online distributor Right Stuf have officially launched a new web page at which fans who purchased the subtitled version of Clannad After Story can upgrade to the bilingual version, set for release on April 19th. All people must do is mail their original copies to Right Stuf, and viola! However, for people who owned both volumes, an upgrade is also available for the return of those, plus $20. If people only own one of the subbed volumes, you can trade that in plus $35 for an upgrade. If people are interesting in just buying the bilingual box set, it will run for about $70 total.

The forums for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block recently added a new section titled “Daten City.”Sound familiar? It is a reference to the city in Gainax’s 2010 series Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt. The section is listed in the same section of the forums as the Bleach and Kekkaishi ones…so I think you can see where I am going with this. Although the Adult Swim staff has not made any official announcement…it does make one draw conclusions, no?

The voice actresses of the characters Ranka and Sheryl from the Macross Frontier anime series announced yesterday that the Sony PlayStation Home network will be the hosts for a “virtual live” Macross Frontier concert. The two characters will be virtually featured in 3D computer graphics. Although there has been no official date set for the concert, it has been stated that we will be able to keep up with updates via the Macross Frontier Twitter and official website.

We finally have an exact release date for the newest Mortal Kombat game, compliments of NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. The game will be available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 starting on April 19th, and as I am sure regular readers will know…I like my Mortal Kombat. A new gameplay trailer was also announced with the release date, and I’m going to link that for you here. (Note: NSFW, yadda, yadda, it’s Mortal Kombat, yo). It features one of my favorite characters, Mileena, who looks to have some awesome looking combos. Also, was she tagged with Kitana in one of those fights?! I think she was.

In continuing Camcom v. Marvel 3 news, two new playable characters were confirmed this past weekend. On the Capcom side, say hello to Akuma from Street Fighter. Stepping into the fray for Marvel, is Deadpool’s arch-nemesis Taskmaster. If you would like to see a glimpse of their fighting styles, the official release trailer, which is right here, flaunts both characters pretty well.

In a huge news week for Square Enix, (one that warrants three stories in fact), we finally have a set release date for the highly anticipated Final Fantasy Dissidia 012. The game, set for release on the PSP (like the original), will be available on March 22nd later this year. New characters confirmed for the game include Kain, Tifa, Aerith, and Lightning. But the real story…IS YUNA’S FOOT! IT IS RIGHT THERE IN THE TRAILER! GAH, YUNA’S FOOT!

In part two of the Square Enix news, the newest game in the Kingdom Hearts series has been made official. The newest game, titled Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, will be featured on the, (you guessed it!), 3DS. Not too much else is known about the game at this point, but if you want to view a trailer of it, you can click here.

In the final third of Square Enix news, they officially confirmed Final Fantasy XIII-2 for release in Japan later this year. The game will feature the return of the character Lightning, and will be playable on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. This is not the most surprising announcement, as just a few days before on January 13th, Square Enix registered the domain name finalfantasyXIII-2game.com. I call spoilers. Also, click here for a trailer…in English.

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Another week of news, along with the first week of the new semester, are officially over for Jubilee! I will make my return next week, with another batch of news cooked up fresh for all of you awesome fanatics. Until then, however, please take advantage of our free fayce whippings, compliments of a Mr. Hank Ishtar.

Today, Square Enix commences peddling manga to other countries, Adult Swim to run more Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood after the new year begins, and you might just have ‘warped DNA’.

Sources:
• Story 1
• Story 2
• Story 3

Well, well, well… As fate would have it there have been some small technical complications with the updating schedule as of late and so this update will likely be seeing little to no front page time. To counter balance the effects of this small set back I’ve decided this will be the day I tackle a more mainstream title, one which is very much near and dear to many of our hearts: BLEACH.

BUT WAIT! Before you venture forth into this mess of an article, you must be warned; this article will be a far off stroll from my familiar well worn path of biographical factoids and you may quickly find yourself stumbling through a dense and alien thicket of spoilers, theories, assumptions, “what-if”s, and “should-have-been”s and so, BE WARNED ye fans of weaker heart, for this article will be a long and tortuous decent into a bubbling cauldron of bias and angry, angry fanboy-ism.

For the sake of consistency however, I will make a point of trying to keep this article author-central and begin with A Brief History of Kubo. (it should be noted that this is of little to no relation with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.)

To begin, Noriaki Kubo was born on June 26th of 1977 to the wife of a town council member of the town of Fuchuu, in the Aki district of the Hiroshima prefecture of Japan. He attended and graduated from a local highschool before his one-shot, Fire in the Sky, placed him as a finalist in Shueisha’s annual Hop Step Competition for new, young manga authors/artists. Interested in seeing Kubo’s career furthered, one of Shueisha’s editors took Kubo under his wing and together worked with him to create Ultra Unholy Hearted Machine, the first of Kubo’s works to appear in Shueisha’s Weekly Shounen Jump in 1996, which was quickly followed by one-shots Rune Master Urara, and Bad Shield United over the course of the next two years.

It was in 1999 that Kubo got his big break and he began his first serialized title, Zombie Powder. Zombie Powder follows hero, Akutabi Gamma, a wanted bounty-head and the last surviving practitioner of an ancient sword school, on a wandering adventure through a wild west themed world littered with elements of sci-fi, where legends of a macabre panacea, the Zombie Powder, a means of raising the dead and granting immortality to the living draw forth the seediest and vilest scum of humanity in search of its power. To obtain the fabled powder however requires one to first gather together the 12 Rings of the Dead scattered across the land.

Accompanying him on his journey are John Elwood Shepherd, a young boy who seeks the powder to resurrect his dead sister, and the mysterious gunman, C.T. Smith whose goals and origins remain unknown. Later additions to the party of adventurers include Wolfgangina Lalla Getto, the 18 year old, H-cup, female paparazzi who holds herself responsible for the comatose state of her broth Emilio, and Angelle Belle Rose Cooney, the 11 year old, strawberry sweets loving, lolita stalker of hero, Akutabi Gamma, and self titled “Genius Beautiful Psychicer”. There is also a non-traveling ally named Nazna Gemini, a maid loving mad-scientist and the physician and tech-support resource for the heroes on their journey.

Kubo’s first serial title was short lived however and after just under a year of publication got the axe, leaving it with a sudden and uncomfortable ending and just 4 volumes worth of collected chapters -all of which have been published into English by Viz Media and which include Kubo’s one-shots, Ultra Unholy Heart Machine, and Bad Shield United in the tail ends of volumes 2, 3, and 4. Zombie Powder’s major faults can be summed up as the faults of its own genre.

Zombie Powder was a true to form Shounen title of the 90s, touting exciting, fast-paced battle scenes set across a seemingly endless world with a creative array of villains, super powers, and exotic weapons ranging from the quirky to the outright bizarre. It of course then suffered notably from an incredibly up and down pace set by a seemingly random assortment of patchwork side stories consisting of meandering from town to town and investigating vague leads as to the whereabouts of the 12 magical macguffins needed to summon forth the titular master magical macguffin.

Ultimately the only real fault of Zombie Powder as a product was that it didn’t do enough to capture the attention of a broader audience. It was considered so-so on almost all accounts with no drastically unique aspects and simply drifted too far down the popularity polls to keep in the JUMP editorial office’s good favor -and whether came before or after Zombie Powder’s down fall, it is worth noting that Kubo suffered through an episode of depression during the last stretch of Zombie Powder’s publication.

To speak of the editorial office, there are a few notes to be made in regards to problems had with Zombie Powder’s content. One small problem with Zombie Powder that I consider to have been one of the deciding factors in Zombie Powder’s cancellation was the abundance of human-vs-human violence and killing, and the unreserved graphic nature of Kubo’s particular sense of style. Kubo had very few reservations when it came to killing off baddies and goons, something that has since surfaced again in his current running title, Bleach, but given the history of the shounen genre, Kubo stepped just a bit too far and just a bit too late in the game. We don’t often think of anime as being “too” violent, especially with the wide variety of murder and fighting titles made popular over the past 10 years, but historically I think it’s important to put things in context…

TIME FOR A HISTORY LESSON!

As it happens there has been a notable increase of violence in children over the past 20-30 years in Japan. During the 80s, pulp style violence had become a popular sort of trend in JUMP, with titles like Hokuto no Ken/Fist of the North Star, City Hunter, Saint Seiya, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures, and Bastard!!, among many others, being hit series. Along with the rise of the hentai branch of the anime industry in the mid 80s, anime and manga had suddenly found itself drifting into ethically murky seas.

The extent of this became overwhelmingly clear, and a very serious point of concern, following the arrest of Tsutomu Miyazaki in the summer of 1989. Miyazaki was arrested for the brutal murder and molestation of four preteen girls between ’88 and ’89. When his room was searched and a large collection of anime video tapes found, the murder case, which had already caught the attention of all of Japan for it’s bizarre and grotesque details, ignited a large number of rag media coverage that took to spotlighting Miyazaki’s nearly 6,000 some videotapes of anime, horror films, and pornography as signs of his deranged personality. This in turn lead to the wide spread negative stereotyping of anime fans, and the popularity of the slang, “Otaku” as a derogatory term towards older anime fans.

It was this negative media coverage that caused a large number of magazines to adapt a much stricter policy concerning violence in manga. First and foremost was that heroes could no longer blatantly kill other human beings, and even then, human-on-human violence in general was strongly discouraged if it was without significant reason. It was partly for this reason that the 90s marked a large shift in content from contemporary settings to worlds of fantasy, and even for titles set in contemporary Japan, the presence of aliens and the supernatural was heavy and the line between reality and fiction stretched to its utmost limits.

HISTORY LESSON OVER!

So then, when we look forward a ways in time to find Kubo publishing the first chapters of Bleach in 2001, we notice a very distinct change, and yet at the same time a very distinct lack of change. Looking at just the early chapters of Bleach alone we see spiky-haired protagonist, Kurosaki Ichigo, who has lost a woman in his life, wielding an oversized sword, and fighting back an evil, berserker alter-ego born from both Elwood and Gamma -but hey, those are some pretty stock and standard traits for anime and manga in general. We see that Wolfgangina’s enormous breasts have found a way ’round through the circle of reincarnation and now live vicariously through Inoue Orihime and the flat chested, super powered arm candy that was Angelle makes a return through Kuchiki Rukia, although there’s a notable change in personality in both girls. The middle aged, glasses-wearing, gunman rival/companion, C.T. Smith, gets downgraded into Ishida Uryuu, the highschool age archer, and at the same time fuses with the mad-scientist and tech-wizard, Nazna Gemini, to create the shady shop keeper and mentor, Urahara Kisuke -still sporting C.T. Smiths hat shadow over the eyes. And of course there’s still the black butterfly motif hanging around for no particular reason other than for the sake of style.

The premise however seems different enough; where as Zombie Powder had the heroes, Gamma and Elwood, running from town to town fighting everyone and everything in search of the Rings of the Dead, Ichigo finds himself bound to his home town conveniently enough, fighting a very specific enemy, who just happen to be monsters. Both are common iterations of the basic shounen formula, but appear to be reasonably different at first glance.

Now you’ll have to indulge me and my theories because this is where things get to be interesting. If you notice, The opening premise to Bleach almost entirely patches the holes that likely sunk Zombie Powder for good: Humans killing humans is bad and treads on shaky moral guidelines? Ok, well now we’re fighting monsters, and they are in fact, by definition, born from negativity! Introducing new towns and getting into new antics just about EVERY chapter wastes too much time? Fine, we’ll just stay here in Karakura town every chapter then. And what’s that, you say? Readers complain the Rings of the Dead are too much like the Dragon Balls? Fine, no more magical wish-granting macguffins at all, good riddance to them! Well then problems solved! Sure, Kubo may have written Zombie Powder the way he did because he liked it that way, but if what he likes is a problem with the editors, he can compromise his story telling vision for the sake of success!

If you don’t quite get where the sarcastic tone in my voice is coming from, allow me to shed some light onto things. Let’s turn the clock ahead by 1 year. 50 chapters into Bleach and we see a sudden change in development: chapter 51 begins the start of the first big story arc of Bleach, the Kuchiki Rukia Rescue arc, aka the SoulSociety Arc.

I should note that a successful first year of publication is usually a fair sign for popular titles in Jump that they’ve got at least another year of solid publication guaranteed, and that that second year’s overall ratings will determine just how much faith can be put in the author for consistently popular work in the future. That being said, it was just after passing this sort of trial period that Kubo launched directly into the Rescue Arc.

Now let me make note for you of the significant changes this made to Kubo’s manga:

First, Ichigo must obtain his powers from Urahara’s training and in doing so he gains the Getsuga Tenshou technique that allows him to fire concentrated spirit energy from the edge of his sword, this later develops into a Black Getsuga that takes the form of a whispy, flame-like, variation of the same attack where the coloration is changed to black, as the name implies. I’ll point out now that in Zombie Powder, Akutabi Gamma’s sword style allowed him to wreath the chains of his chainsaw-sword in black flames that he would whip and lash at his opponents with.

Second, the setting changes from the humble little town of Karakura to the wide expanse of SoulSociety, and finding themselves in this strange new world the heroes must take to finding their way not only into the center of SoulSociety but to Rukia’s location where they will of course break her free of her imprisonment.

Third is that the hollows are pushed entirely out of the picture and our attentions are turned to the Shinigami as the new enemies/roadblocks that must be overcome in order for the plot to continue. For those who don’t know, the shinigami (Lit. Death Gods) are psychopomp figures in Japanese/Shinto mythos and in the case of Bleach, take the form of people dressed in black kimono’s with white sashes and armed with katanas capable of purifying wicked souls.

Now I have to stop and ask you; “Has it all sunk in yet?” I think you’ll find that all of the changes made in facilitating the SoulSociety Arc serve to directly cancel out all of the major changes Kubo seemed to have made between Zombie Powder and Bleach.

The monsters are gone and we’re fighting human looking people again which puts us back into a gray area where the villains are also people and can now be sympathized with, in spite of any or at times ALL serious character flaws -Zaraki Kenpachi, I’m looking right at you there buddy. Because, after all, it should go without saying that having young readers idolize the battle-hungry sociopath presents no fundamental problems in regards to ethics!

In leaving Karakura behind we enter the strange new world that is Soul Society and must follow our heroes’ adventure through the unknown while learning how the different places and customs of Soul Society work.

And then finally we’re no longer just protecting people as we come to them, we have a finite goal for the first real time, and it doesn’t just start and end with beating up the badguy: Ichigo and company must find Rukia, stop the execution, and get back to the Human World.

So now maybe you realize that at the first signs of an ongoing story arc, Bleach suddenly goes back to being a lot like what Kubo had going with Zombie Powder in the first place, sans the magical wish granting macguffin…

OH WAIT! Yes, that’s right, in the middle of the rescue operation when we’re met with Kubo’s first attempt at a plot twist -admittedly one of only few successful ones he has managed to employ thus far- in which Soul Society’s 5th Division captain, Aizen Sousuke, turns up dead, we begin tugging the strings of inquiry that eventually lead us to a little plot device known as the Hougyoku (Lit. Rupture Gem) a magical tool and product of the experiments of Urahara Kisuke that allows for the villain to create an army of more powerful enemies, and so naturally it is our hero’s duty to retrieve the dangerous magical device from the corrupt clutches of the evil mastermind. So, in other words, it’s a magical macguffin.

Ok, so now we’ve gotten past a big chunk of the story with Bleach. And now, 20 volumes/178 chapters/63episodes (+28 filler episodes) later, we find ourselves at another major turning point: Rukia has been saved, the shinigami of Soul Society have gone from adversaries to allies, Aizen has been established as the new villain, and the retrieval of the Hougyoku is now the overarching goal of the story. It is also here that I will end Part 1 of this article and leave you all hanging for a few weeks! Bwahahahahahahaha!

Until next time, suckers! >:D