If you have followed Hunter x Hunter for any length of time, you already know the drill. A handful of brilliant chapters land, the internet loses its mind, and then the series vanishes again like it never existed. So here is some good news to start with: it is back. Togashi's manga is set to resume serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump later this month, the latest chapter in a comeback fans have been refreshing for years. And honestly, that is the perfect excuse to look at the bigger story, because the hiatuses themselves have become as legendary as the manga.
I have read a lot of long-running series, but I cannot think of another one where the gaps between chapters became part of the fandom's identity. People who have never watched a single episode know the meme. So let me walk you through how we got here, because it is a genuinely human story underneath all the jokes.
How A 1998 Hit Became A Stop-Start Legend
Yoshihiro Togashi launched Hunter x Hunter in Weekly Shonen Jump on March 3, 1998. For its first stretch it ran like a normal weekly title, and the early arcs (the Hunter Exam, Heavens Arena, Yorknew City) are some of the tightest shonen storytelling you will ever read. Then, starting around 2006, the breaks began creeping in. What started as the occasional pause grew into months at a time, and eventually into multi-year stretches of total silence.
As Wikipedia's publication history lays out, the series has been frequently interrupted since 2006, with long intervals between releases ever since. The pattern is so consistent that fans stopped expecting a steady schedule and started treating every new batch of chapters as a small holiday. The manga currently sits at well over 400 chapters across more than 35 collected volumes, which sounds like a lot until you realize how many calendar years it took to get there.
The Back Pain Behind The Disappearing Act
Here is the part the memes tend to skip. The hiatuses are not laziness. They are health. Togashi has dealt with chronic back and hip problems for years, and in 2022 he was candid about just how bad it got. In a statement tied to an exhibition of his work, he explained that he had been unable to sit in a chair for roughly two years, which made drawing nearly impossible, and that he only resumed by throwing out conventional methods and working differently.
What does "differently" mean? He drew lying down. In May 2022 Togashi finally joined Twitter, now X, and the account became an event in itself. He posted photos of handwritten storyboard pages, sketched while flat on his back, and each one sent the fandom into a frenzy. There is something quietly moving about a creator at that level fighting through real pain just to put pages in front of people who have waited so long.
184 Weeks: The Hiatus That Broke The Record
Plenty of fans have tried to quantify exactly how much time the series has spent missing, and the most famous attempt is the community-run HUNTER X HUNTER Hiatus Chart (the "hiatus-hiatus" tracker). It maps every week of Weekly Shonen Jump in blue or red: blue for weeks the manga ran, red for weeks it sat out. The result is a wall of red that genuinely has to be seen to be believed.
By the tracker's count, the longest unbroken hiatus ran for about 184 consecutive weeks, stretching from early 2019 to late 2022, which works out to roughly three years and ten months without a new chapter. The official record-keepers put that same gap at around three years and eleven months, the longest in the manga's history. Either way you slice it, that is a stat that should be treated as fan-tabulated rather than gospel, but the broad strokes line up across every source I checked.
What YU YU HAKUSHO Has To Do With It
To understand why Togashi works the way he does, you have to rewind to his breakout hit. Yu Yu Hakusho ran in the early-to-mid 1990s and was a monster success, but the grind that fueled it left a mark. The weekly Shonen Jump schedule is famously brutal, and by the back half of that series Togashi was reportedly dealing with burnout and the same kind of physical strain that haunts him today. You can even see it in the rushed, abrupt ending many fans still debate.
So when people ask why Hunter x Hunter cannot just keep a normal release pace, part of the answer is decades old. This is a creator who has already been ground down once by the machine and has openly chosen his health and his vision over the relentless weekly cadence. We covered his own comments on a potential ending for the series a while back, and that long view colors everything about how he releases new work.
Why Fans Put Up With It
The obvious question: why do readers tolerate a manga that might vanish for years at a time? The simplest answer is that the chapters are worth it. When Hunter x Hunter is firing, it does things almost nothing else in the genre attempts, dense political intrigue, brutal stakes, a power system that rewards rereading, and arcs that pivot the entire story on a dime. Fans do not stick around out of habit. They stick around because the payoff keeps clearing the bar.
There is also the simple matter of trust. Togashi keeps coming back. After every long silence, the storyboards reappear, the X account stirs, and another batch of chapters drops. The June 29 resumption is just the newest chapter of that cycle, and if his recent comeback runs are anything to go by, the wait will feel worth it the moment we are back in his world. What is the longest you have ever waited on a series, and would you give it the patience fans give this one?
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