If you have been refreshing your manga apps every Monday hoping for a sign, this is the one you wanted. Hunter x Hunter is coming back. Per Anime News Network, Yoshihiro Togashi's series resumes in Weekly Shonen Jump on June 29 with Chapter 411, picking the story back up after roughly 18 months away. As a longtime reader, I have learned not to get too attached to these return dates, but this one feels real, and I will explain why in a second.
The announcement landed in Weekly Shonen Jump and quickly spread across the usual outlets, with CBR, GameRant and ScreenRant all running it the same day. Chapter 410 was the last installment fans got, all the way back in the December 2024 issue, so a lot of us have been sitting on a cliffhanger for a year and a half. If you fell off somewhere in there, you are not alone, and now is the perfect time to climb back aboard the Black Whale.
There is a nice bonus stacked right next to the chapter, too. Volume 39, titled "Negotiation," hits shelves in Japan on July 3 and collects chapters 401 through 410. That makes it the first new tankobon volume in about 22 months, since Volume 38 arrived back in September 2024. So within a single week you get a fresh chapter AND a new book to catch up on. For a series that measures its breaks in years, that is practically a flood.
The Hiatus King, Explained
Here is the part newer fans sometimes miss. Hunter x Hunter has been famous for its hiatuses for almost twenty years, and it is not because Togashi lost interest. He has dealt with serious, chronic back problems that have made sitting at a drawing desk genuinely painful, and he has said in the past that he often has to work lying down. The breaks started piling up around 2006, and the longest single gap ran from 2018 into 2022. Fans have tracked the absences so obsessively that there is an entire community-maintained hiatus chart out there. It became a running joke, but the reason behind it was never funny.
What changed the mood was Togashi himself. In May 2022 he quietly opened an account on the platform now called X, said he would mainly report on the progress of the manuscript, and then did exactly that. He picked up a million followers in a day and posted photos of inked pages and page counts. That little window into the process turned the anxiety of waiting into something closer to a group countdown. The most recent update, posted June 14, reportedly had him finished inking all the way through Chapter 431. I want to be careful here: that is Togashi's own self-reported progress, not an official Shueisha promise of a set backlog. Still, twenty-plus drawn chapters is a very encouraging sign that this return has legs.
If the name Togashi rings a bell beyond this series, that is because he created Yu Yu Hakusho back in the early 90s, one of the best-selling Shonen Jump titles of its era, before Hunter x Hunter debuted in March 1998. The franchise has over 84 million copies in circulation and is closing in on 410 published chapters across those 39 volumes. For a series that has spent so much of the last decade on the bench, those are staggering numbers, and they tell you how much goodwill Togashi has banked with readers.
Where The Story Stands
So what are we actually walking back into? The manga is deep in the Succession Contest arc, the dense political war that has dominated the back half of the story. The cast is crammed aboard the ship Black Whale 1, bound for the Dark Continent, while King Nasubi of the Kakin Empire secretly turns the voyage into a death match among his fourteen princes, each armed with Nen powers and a Guardian Spirit Beast. Kurapika is in the thick of it, still hunting the last of his clan's Scarlet Eyes, and the Phantom Troupe are circling too. It is one of the most intricate arcs Togashi has ever attempted, which is part of why it has taken so long to draw.
If you want to rewatch before the new chapters drop, the definitive 2011 Madhouse anime is streaming on Netflix, along with Hulu and Tubi in the US. One heads up: it was pulled from Crunchyroll back in March 2025 when that license lapsed, so do not go looking for it there. The 2011 series only adapts the manga up through the Chimera Ant and election arcs, so everything happening on the Black Whale is manga-only territory for now. That is exactly the gap a new anime season would need to fill someday, though no such thing has been announced.
We have watched manga giants stumble through health-related breaks before. Eiichiro Oda has paused One Piece more than once to protect his own health, as we covered when that hiatus was announced, and the lesson is always the same: a healthy creator is worth the wait. So I am thrilled, but I am also rooting for Togashi to pace himself. Chapter 411 on June 29, Volume 39 on July 3. Are you jumping straight back in, or doing a full reread first? Let us know what you are most excited to see resolved on the Black Whale.
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