Hunter x Hunter Is Back: Inside Togashi's 2026 Comeback and the Succession Contest's Endgame

Hunter x Hunter is being published again, on a roughly weekly schedule, for the first time since January 2023. That sentence alone would have been enough to make Weekly Shonen Jump Issue #31 a notable one. Shueisha stacked a second piece of news on top of it: in that same issue, the publisher announced that Hunter x Hunter's total circulation, print and digital combined, had crossed 100 million copies — putting Yoshihiro Togashi's manga in the same circulation tier as One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Demon Slayer, and Jujutsu Kaisen, according to Anime News Network. For a series whose publication history is defined almost as much by its absences as by its chapters, that's a strange and fairly remarkable moment to land on.

The long hiatus, by the numbers

The hiatus that just ended started in January 2023, following a stretch of chapters that ran from Chapter 401 in the fall of 2024 through Chapter 410 in February 2025 — with Chapter 400 itself having appeared in Volume 38 back in September 2024, per Anime News Network's reporting. It's worth sitting with those numbers for a second: the run immediately before this hiatus wasn't even particularly long, ten chapters over about four months, following a series pattern where short bursts of publication have alternated with long silences for years. What made this particular break different was its length. Going from Chapter 410 in February 2025 to Chapter 411 in June 2026 is a gap of roughly a year and four months, one of the longer stretches the manga has gone dark for since Togashi's chronic health issues began shaping its publication schedule.

Chapter 411 and the weekly-ish comeback

Serialization resumed with Chapter 411 in Weekly Shonen Jump Issue #31, cover-dated for a Japanese release of June 29, 2026, with the chapter available to English-reading fans a day earlier, on June 28, via Viz's simultaneous release, according to Anime News Network and CBR. What's notable about the months since isn't just that the manga came back — it's that it's kept coming back. The run from Chapter 411 onward has proceeded on an approximately weekly cadence for months now, a pace Hunter x Hunter hasn't sustained in years. That consistency is the real story underneath the comeback headline: it's one thing for a hiatus-prone series to publish a single return chapter, and another for it to hold something close to a normal Shonen Jump schedule through the summer.

How much Togashi actually has banked

The reason the weekly pace has been possible isn't a sudden change in how fast Togashi is drawing — it's that he wasn't publishing at all during the hiatus, but he also wasn't idle. According to CBR, Togashi's manuscripts and inking were reportedly complete through roughly Chapter 421 by the time the series resumed, with somewhere around ten finished chapters ready to publish at the moment of the comeback. Other outlets have cited even larger numbers for the same backlog — ScreenRant and Anime News Network have both referenced figures as high as chapters 430 or 431 in their own coverage — and the specific count seems to shift depending on the outlet and when exactly it was reported, so it's worth treating the precise chapter number as a moving, outlet-dependent figure rather than a single settled fact. What all the reporting agrees on is the shape of the situation: Togashi built up a substantial buffer of completed material during the hiatus, and that buffer is what's currently letting the manga run on something resembling a normal weekly release without him having to draw each chapter in real time under deadline.

Togashi himself has been circumspect about what happens once that buffer runs out. He's publicly asked fans, per CBR and ScreenRant's coverage, to "wait for the announcement from the Jump editorial department regarding the publication timing for chapters 420 onward" — a statement that reads as an acknowledgment that the current pace isn't guaranteed to hold indefinitely, even with a sizable stock of finished chapters in hand.

Volume 39, and what "not weekly" actually means going forward

The clearest physical marker of the comeback is Volume 39, subtitled "Negotiation," which released in Japan on July 3, 2026 — the manga's first new volume in 22 months, according to Anime News Network and CBR. That gap is itself a useful way to measure how long the wait actually was for readers who prefer collected volumes over chapter-by-chapter serialization.

At the same time, Shueisha's editorial department has been explicit that it doesn't see this as a return to a permanent weekly grind. Per Anime News Network's reporting, corroborated by CBR and Popverse, the editorial department has determined that the manga "should not follow a weekly serialized format going forward." That's a slightly odd statement to sit alongside months of actual weekly chapters, but the two things aren't really in tension — the weekly cadence readers have seen since Chapter 411 is being sustained by the pre-existing buffer of finished manuscripts, not by Togashi drawing on a live weekly deadline. Editorial's stated position is about the format the series will settle into once that buffer is drawn down, not a description of what's currently happening on the page.

100 million copies and a street named after the manga

The circulation milestone announced in the same issue as Chapter 411 is a significant marker for a series that's spent more of the last decade on hiatus than on active serialization. Anime News Network reports that Hunter x Hunter's combined print-and-digital circulation surpassed 100 million copies, a threshold that places it alongside Shueisha's other billion-dollar franchises. Shueisha marked the occasion with a real-world tie-in campaign, "Shibuya Hunter Street," launched in Tokyo and featuring 115 different Hunter x Hunter characters spread across the Shibuya ward, according to ANN's coverage. It's the kind of promotional push publishers typically reserve for their biggest, most bankable properties — a signal that, hiatus history notwithstanding, Shueisha still treats the series as a flagship title rather than a legacy franchise coasting on nostalgia.

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Where the story picked back up: the Succession Contest

Chapter 411 didn't reset the story — it dropped readers back into the middle of the Succession Contest (also referred to as the Succession War) arc, the storyline that was already in progress when the hiatus began back in early 2023. The setting is still the Black Whale, the ship carrying the Kakin royal family's warring princes and princesses across the sea, each backed by their own retinues of Hunters and Nen users angling to secure the throne. Per ScreenRant's coverage of the arc's current state, several plot threads have been running in parallel since the return: Prince Benjamin's poisoning and survival scheme, the looming threat of martial law being declared aboard the ship, the Phantom Troupe's ongoing hunt for Hisoka, and the rising influence of the Heil-Ly Family within the succession power struggle. It's a lot of moving pieces for a single arc, which has always been part of what made the Succession Contest one of the more structurally ambitious stretches of the series — closer in scale to a political thriller with a rotating cast of assassins than to the smaller-scale Hunter Exam or Chimera Ant arcs that came before it.

Benjamin's endgame and Tserriednich's not-quite-death

The last two chapters have moved that arc forward in a real way. Chapter 417, released August 16, 2026, reportedly laid out Prince Benjamin's actual endgame: aware that the parasite TSK-17 will kill him within hours regardless of what he does, Benjamin is using his remaining time to eliminate the rest of the surviving princes, aiming to trigger Kakin's emergency succession law in a way that leaves his own bloodline positioned to inherit the throne even after his death. It's a bleak, calculated piece of plotting that fits the arc's overall tone — a character who can't save himself instead spending his last hours engineering an outcome for people who'll outlive him.

Chapter 418, released August 23, 2026, complicated that picture further. According to recap coverage of the chapter, Prince Tserriednich — believed dead by both Benjamin and his aide Theta — is not actually dead. Per that recap coverage, Tserriednich used his Nen ability, Parallel Future, to fake his death by disrupting perceived reality within a localized radius around wherever he activates the ability, and has reportedly learned to sustain that illusion even after being hit with Zetsu-disrupting effects from the character Melody's ability. It's worth flagging clearly that this specific plot detail comes from a secondary recap source rather than from outlets like Anime News Network or CBR directly verifying the chapter's text, and recap sites have historically varied in how precisely they describe Nen mechanics — so treat the exact wording of what Parallel Future does, and how it interacts with Zetsu, as an approximate summary rather than a verified quote from the chapter itself. The broader beat — that Tserriednich survived and deceived Benjamin's side into believing otherwise — is the more load-bearing takeaway; the technical explanation of how is softer ground.

Taken together, the two chapters reset the arc's stakes just as readers were settling back into the story: Benjamin's plan was built on an assumption that turns out to be wrong, which means whatever he does next is now happening with incomplete information about who's actually still alive on the board.

Togashi's health and what comes next

None of this comeback exists separately from Togashi's long-documented health problems. His chronic back issues have been the recurring, publicly acknowledged cause behind past hiatuses going back years, and ScreenRant's coverage of the 2026 return has framed his recent public appearances — including Instagram posts alongside his wife, Sailor Moon creator Naoko Takeuchi — as a sign of improved health underpinning the more consistent output this year. Anime News Network's own coverage of Takeuchi publicly cheering on her husband corroborates that read, without going so far as to make any specific medical claims about his condition.

Chapter 419 is scheduled for August 30, 2026, according to Popverse's release tracker, continuing straight out of the Tserriednich cliffhanger. Beyond that immediate chapter, the bigger open question is how long the current weekly pace can hold. Between the reported chapter buffer, Togashi's own request that fans wait for an official editorial announcement about chapters beyond 420, and Shueisha's stated position that the series won't stay on a permanent weekly format, all the signs point toward some kind of schedule adjustment eventually — just not one with a confirmed date yet. For now, Hunter x Hunter is doing something it hasn't done in years: publishing consistently, moving its central arc forward, and doing it all while riding a genuinely rare piece of good news for a series whose fans have spent a very long time bracing for the opposite.