Draw This, Then Die! Treats Manga as a Life's Work
The first pick in the column that Japanese anime news site Anime Anime published on August 5, 2026, is Draw This, Then Die! (Kore Kaite Shine), Minoru Toyoda's manga about making manga. Its protagonist, Ai Yasumi (安海相), is a high schooler who discovers manga and is seized by the urge to draw it herself. The column's core observation is that the series treats manga not as something you read but as something you stake your life on, and that the anime makes that devotion even clearer.
According to the column, the adaptation adds careful staging to the scenes where characters talk about manga and wrestle with their own creations, so that the moments when a character is moved by a page land on the viewer too. It also puts real screen time into the unglamorous side of production: storyboarding, inking, and deadline crunches, all without losing the underlying feeling that drawing is fun. The columnist describes the result as an anime made by people who love manga, for people who love manga.
The series is animated at Shin-Ei Animation under director Hiroaki Akagi and has aired Fridays on Nippon TV since July 3, 2026. Toyoda's original runs in Shogakukan's Monthly Shonen Sunday and won the 70th Shogakukan Manga Award.
Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia Sweats the 13th-Century Details
The second pick approaches love for the source material from a completely different direction. Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia (Tenmaku no Jadugar), adapted from Tomato Soup's historical manga for the publisher Akita Shoten, follows Sitara, a young woman living through the power struggles of the 13th-century Mongol Empire. She is the kind of figure history left almost no record of, and the column praises the anime for centering her life rather than the empire's famous names.
What impressed the columnist most is the research. Costumes, household tools, food culture, and court etiquette are all rendered with enough specificity to suggest what daily life actually looked like, rather than settling for generic period flavor. The column also singles out the show's refusal to paint historical figures as simple heroes: amid the succession fight that followed Genghis Khan, every character carries their own position and agenda. Recent episodes cited include Act 3, "Keshienu Honō" (roughly "A Fire That Cannot Be Erased"), and Act 6, "Merugen no Tami" ("The People of Mergen").
The adaptation comes from Science Saru, directed by Abel Góngora with Naoko Yamada (K-On!, A Silent Voice) as chief director. Per the column, the cast's vocal performances and the direction's use of expressions and pauses amplify the subtle emotional shifts the manga is known for.
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Fills In What the Manga Couldn't
The third pick is the boldest argument. For Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, the column says faithfulness alone is not the point: the manga's final arc was a high point of the original, but its limited page count left parts of the story undrawn. The Studio Pierrot anime, produced under the supervision of creator Tite Kubo, fills those blank spaces with original conversations between characters, expanded battle sequences, and background drama that never existed on the page.
The column points to the sheer scale of the fights, where exchanges the manga covered in a single panel become full setpieces, and calls the staging of the series' signature Bankai releases overwhelming. It cites episodes 41, "GOD OF THUNDER," and 42, "SON OF DARKNESS," from the currently airing final stretch. The added scenes, the columnist argues, deepen the characters by showing why they made their choices, giving longtime readers new discoveries rather than a shot-for-shot replay. In the column's framing, the anime is not trying to surpass the manga; it is widening what the manga could be, and that is the ultimate form of respect.
Looking Ahead
All three series are airing now as part of the Summer 2026 season, and all three are easily accessible internationally. Crunchyroll streams both Draw This, Then Die! and Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia. Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War is in its fourth and final part, subtitled The Calamity, which premiered July 25, 2026 and streams on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in most other regions.
The same goes for the source manga. Seven Seas publishes Draw This, Then Die! in English, with volume 1 arriving August 11, 2026. Tomato Soup's original is available from Yen Press under the title A Witch's Life in Mongol, and Tite Kubo's Bleach is published in English by Viz Media.