Satoshi Shiki’s Casshern R manga is coming to an end. Retailers are listing the third compiled volume as the final one, and it ships on December 18. The listing is the source of the news for now, so there is no publisher statement beyond the volume itself.
Casshern R adapts Shinzo Ningen Casshan, the 1973 television anime from Tatsunoko Production. The story follows Tetsuya Azuma, a young man who becomes Casshern to fight Andro and his robot army after they turn on humanity. The manga puts a new coat of paint on a premise that has been revived several times over five decades.
A short run across two platforms
The run was short. The series launched in Monthly Champion RED in September 2023, with Chabo Higurashi writing the script. It did not stay there. Akita Shoten announced in November 2023 that the manga would move to the publisher’s Manga Cross website, and it restarted serialization from the fourth chapter in April 2025. Manga Cross is Akita Shoten’s free web manga platform, and it has become a common destination for the publisher’s ongoing series in recent years. Three volumes across a magazine and then a web platform is a brief life, though the move between formats explains part of it.
The Casshern franchise, fifty years on
The franchise behind the manga is older than most of its readers. Casshan arrived in 1973, part of the same early wave at Tatsunoko that produced Gatchaman a year earlier. The original Casshan anime aired in Japan that year. A remake OVA, Casshan: Robot Hunter, followed in 1993. Kazuaki Kiriya directed a live-action film, Casshern, in 2004. The most recent revival was Casshern Sins in 2008, which Funimation streamed and released on Blu-ray and DVD in North America. Streamline Pictures and ADV Films both put out Robot Hunter in the West, and Go Fish Pictures handled the live-action movie.
Shiki’s own record is a useful way to read the ending. He wrapped up Akuma Kojo, also known as The Devil Princess, in May 2024, with the third and final volume out that August. Before that he ended Attack on Titan: Before the Fall in March 2019. He is also the artist behind The Legend of Dororo and Hyakkimaru, a remake of Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo that Seven Seas Entertainment is releasing in English, and he drew XBlade and Daphne in the Brilliant Blue earlier in his career. Three volumes is on the short side for him, but Casshern R was never meant to run for years.
What happens next
What it means in practice is that another entry in the Casshern line is closing. The property has spent more than fifty years being reworked for each new generation, and this version adds one more three-volume chapter to that history. Fans who want the complete run in print have until the December volume to fill the gap on the shelf, and anyone curious about where the series started can trace it back to the 1973 original.
Akita Shoten has not announced a final chapter date for the serialization itself, only the volume that closes out the print release. Similar end-of-run notices have been landing all month, from Boichi’s The Marshal King to Yasuki Tanaka’s Ghost Fixers, and our manga endings and licenses hub follows the rest.
Source: Anime News Network, citing retailer listings for the third volume.
Featured image: Cover art for Satoshi Shiki’s Casshern R, via Anime News Network.
