Teenage Mercenary is getting a TV anime, and J.C. Staff is handling the animation. Crunchyroll announced the studio and main staff during its New York Comic Con panel on Thursday, confirming the adaptation of YC and Rakyeon’s webtoon for broadcast in 2027.
Manabu Ono is directing and overseeing the series scripts. His recent credits include Sword Art Online: Alicization and Dead Mount Death Play. Koji Haneda, who worked on Spice & Wolf: merchant meets the wise wolf and The Faraway Paladin, is designing the characters. Hiroyuki Sawano is composing the music, adding another title to a resume that already includes Attack on Titan, Kingdom, and The Seven Deadly Sins. HAYATE is producing.
The story
The original webtoon follows Yu Ijin, who loses his parents in a plane crash at age eight and ends up stranded in a foreign country. To survive, he becomes a child mercenary. Ten years later he returns home to Korea, where the danger is supposedly over and the biggest problem is finishing high school. It is not that simple. With one year left, Ijin has to work out how a person trained for war fits into an ordinary school, and which side should be more worried about the other.
How big the webtoon is
The series started on Naver Webtoon in Korea in November 2020 and launched on LINE Manga in Japan in April 2021. It has more than 730 million domestic views as of May 2025. It took first place in LINE Manga’s 2023 annual ranking and repeated in 2024 for ongoing series. The webtoon is available in 10 languages and has passed 2.84 billion views worldwide as of September 2026. WEBTOON began publishing it in English in June 2021.
Part of a bigger slate
The adaptation is one of the titles tied to a partnership between HAYATE, LINE Digital Frontier, and Crunchyroll. That deal, also announced at New York Comic Con, covers potential anime adaptations of around 15 WEBTOON titles developed from the ground up. The Boxer and The Remarried Empress are among the others already moving forward. HAYATE itself was founded in March 2025, is staffed by employees from Aniplex and Crunchyroll, and is also overseeing the Ghost of Tsushima: Legends anime.
Why it matters
J.C. Staff and Sawano are a strong pairing on paper, and Ono has steered long-running adaptations before. For a webtoon with this much reach, the anime is less a novelty than a test. Korean webtoons have become a regular source for Japanese studios, and how Teenage Mercenary turns out will shape how much of that pipeline moves forward.
A 2027 broadcast window is all that has been confirmed so far. No exact date or episode count has been announced.
For another title from the same partnership, see our report on The Remarried Empress anime from TROYCA, and for the studio’s webtoon slate, our coverage of The Boxer’s TV anime and cast.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Teenage Mercenary anime key visual, via Teenage Mercenary anime website / Anime News Network.
