Naruto Shadow Rising Manga Announced: Masashi Kishimoto Returns to Draw New Series
I’ve been writing about anime for a long time, and I thought I’d lost the ability to be surprised by franchise announcements. Reboots, spin-offs, ‘special projects’: I’ve seen them all and usually respond with a polite nod. Then New York Comic Con 2026 happened, and I spent a good ten minutes just staring at my screen.
Masashi Kishimoto is writing and drawing a new Naruto manga himself. It’s called Naruto: Shadow Rising, and it’s the first time he’s picked up the pen for a multi-chapter Naruto story since the original run ended in November 2014. Twelve years is a long time to wait for a return that most of us had quietly filed under ‘never going to happen.’
The Reveal That Nobody Saw Coming
The news dropped at the NARUTO What is Next panel, with Junko Takeuchi (Naruto’s Japanese voice) and Noriaki Sugiyama (Sasuke’s) on stage. Casting those two as the faces of the announcement was a smart choice. Hearing the original voices of Team 7 next to news like this hits a very specific nostalgia nerve.
But the manga isn’t the whole story. It’s the centerpiece of something bigger.
Project Rasengan: A Three-Year Plan, Not a One-Off
Shueisha, Studio Pierrot, and the rest of the franchise stakeholders are calling the whole thing Project Rasengan, a roadmap running from 2026 through 2029 across manga, anime, card games, and mobile games. The closing slide showed eight mystery boxes, and only four were opened. Four more surprises are still waiting.
Here’s what we know so far:
| Project | What it is | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Naruto: Shadow Rising | New manga, written and drawn by Kishimoto | Details at Jump Festa 2027 |
| Naruto x Ninku | 4-episode anime crossover | Studio Pierrot production |
| Naruto Mobile | Global launch of the 2016 China-only game | More info later this year |
| Naruto Card Game | Three starter decks plus a booster set | Worldwide, June 2027 |
| Live-action film | Lionsgate movie directed by Destin Daniel Cretton | Casting for Team 7 underway |
What I like about this slate is that it feels coordinated. Franchise ‘revivals’ often smell like a panicked scramble for relevance. This one reads like people who sat down, mapped out three years, and put the creator at the center of it.
Why the Blank Period Is a Brilliant Choice
Shadow Rising is set in the Blank Period, the gap between the end of the Fourth Great Ninja War and the start of Boruto: Naruto Next Generations. Kakashi is Sixth Hokage, the village is rebuilding, and the peace is fragile. Naruto hasn’t become Seventh Hokage yet.
I think this is the most interesting stretch of the whole timeline, and it’s been sitting there empty for years. The war is over, but nobody tells you how people actually live afterward. These are characters who spent their teens as child soldiers, and now they have to figure out adulthood with all of that still attached to them.
The questions I’m itching to see answered:
- How does Naruto handle the distance between the hero everyone cheers for and the person who just wants to do the job well?
- What does ‘redemption’ actually look like for Sasuke when he’s walking the world alone?
- How does the political fallout of the war reshape the Leaf Village?
That’s not a story about a bigger villain with a bigger power-up. It’s a story about aftermath, and I’d argue Kishimoto has always been strongest when he writes about people carrying weight.
The Teaser Trailer, Frame by Frame
The Super Teaser PV doesn’t use finished animation. It’s raw sketches and concept art drawn by Kishimoto himself. That alone tells you something: this is hand-made, not polished marketing.
A few moments stuck with me:
- The Hokage Rock. Workers are carving Naruto’s face into the monument next to Kakashi’s. It’s a quiet, beautiful visual, the dream becoming literal stone.
- Adult Team 7. Naruto looks older and steadier, Hokage hat in hand, with a bandaged right arm that hides the prosthetic grown from Hashirama’s cells. Kakashi has that same knowing smirk under the mask. Sasuke stands in heavy rain, serious as ever.
- Sakura and baby Sarada. This is the one that got me. Sakura looks down at a newborn with such a soft expression that it almost feels like a deleted scene from a different, gentler series. It confirms the manga will touch the birth of the next generation.
- Naruto vs. Sasuke, again. The teaser ends on a fierce clash between the two. I’m not buying that it’s a simple sparring match. Maybe it’s a friendly test of Naruto’s new arm, but my gut says something from the war’s leftovers is forcing them back into an ideological argument. We’ll know more soon enough.
Naruto x Ninku: The Love Letter Inside the Announcement
If you only follow the manga news, you might miss the part that made me emotional. The panel also revealed Naruto x Ninku, a four-episode limited anime crossover with Koji Kiriyama’s 1990s series Ninku.
Kishimoto has said for years that Ninku was his main inspiration, and in his comments on this project, he said without it, Naruto wouldn’t exist. He even said he drew a ninja manga because he wanted a spiritual continuation of Kiriyama’s work. That’s about as honest as a creator gets.
The setup is delightful. Kakashi can’t join the mission because of his Hokage duties, so Naruto is named acting squad leader. Team 7 accidentally triggers a spatial anomaly and lands in an alternate world, where they meet Fusuke, a 12-year-old with a frog-like face who fights with the Ninku school, a mix of karate and ninjutsu.
The staff list is stacked, too: Studio Pierrot, director Noriyuki Abe (who led the original Ninku anime and worked on Boruto), Tetsuya Nishio as character designer and chief animation director, and music by Yasuharu Takanashi, Yaiba, and Yusuke Honma. Kishimoto and Kiriyama are both co-producing and supervising all four episodes. When a creator pays tribute to his own hero this directly, it feels like a family reunion.
How the Fandom Is Taking It
The reaction online is the closest thing to collective relief I’ve seen in a long while. A big chunk of the audience drifted away from Boruto as it leaned into sci-fi tech, cyborgs, and cosmic Otsutsuki gods. I don’t think that’s a criticism of the people making it so much as a statement of taste: many of us just missed the grounded, organic feel of the original.
Kishimoto’s drawing style is a huge part of that appeal. His panel flow, anatomy, and sense of motion are what made fights readable and gut-punching.
There’s also a practical reason to feel optimistic. Kishimoto has said he isn’t the one drawing the Boruto manga, since that belongs to his longtime former assistant Mikio Ikemoto. That means he’s not stretching himself across two series. He’s also said that spending more time with his family over the last few years gave him a fresh wave of creative energy. I believe that. Rest is underrated, and you can often see it in the work that comes after.
What Comes Next: Jump Festa 2027
Right now we have a title, a setting, a teaser, and a creator. We don’t have a release date, a chapter count, a serialization schedule, or a full synopsis. All of that is promised for Jump Festa 2027, taking place December 19 and 20, 2026 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan. Naruto has a slot on the Jump Super Stage Red, and Kishimoto is expected to share more insight and new art.
My plan is simple: clear my schedule for that weekend and keep my expectations loose. The best thing about this announcement is that it doesn’t ask us to relive the past. It asks us to look at the people we grew up with in a quieter, more human chapter of their lives, drawn by the person who made them.
