An Honor Student, a Ghost-Eater, and a Club
Phantom Busters takes place in Kamakura and opens with a rescue. Eugene Korekishi (是岸遊人), a student who placed first in his entrance exams and has zero spiritual sensitivity, pulls a drowning boy out of the sea. That boy is Mogari Shishikuno (宍喰野虎落), who cannot see ghosts either but performs exorcisms anyway by eating them. The two form Phantom Busters, a school club dedicated to exorcism work. Kaoru Kanzaki, who can see ghosts, and Kotaro Tamon, who can hear their voices, fill out the four-member lineup.
Viz Media, which publishes the series in English, puts the hook more bluntly in its official description: "Why bother fighting spectral foes like all the other exorcists when you can just eat them?" The four-way split of abilities drives the comedy. Nobody in the club has a complete set of senses, so the job gets done by committee.
Japanese entertainment news site Comic Natalie, which broke the anime news on September 24, files the series under a genre label that translates roughly as "evil-spirit-banishing youth comedy." Note the word order there. The supernatural work is the setting; the high school comedy is the point.
From a One-Shot to 1.4 Million Copies
Neoshoco first published Phantom Busters as a one-shot in Jump SQ.Rise in October 2022, then launched it as a serial in Shueisha's monthly Jump Square in August 2023. Circulation has since passed 1.4 million copies including digital editions, and volume 8 goes on sale in Japan on October 2.
The series has spent two years climbing Japan's industry rankings. It finished second in the 2025 edition of "Comics Recommended by Bookstore Employees Nationwide," a poll of frontline retail staff that tends to pick up titles before they break commercially. It also placed fourth in AnimeJapan's 2025 ranking of manga that fans most want to see animated, a list whose top entries have a strong recent record of actually getting adapted.
Neoshoco marked the announcement with a celebratory illustration and a short comment thanking readers. The author wrote that Fanbus, the nickname Japanese fans use for the series, is a work whose sense of fun comes across more sharply in animation, and called it genuinely gratifying that the adaptation has become a reality. The comment ends by asking readers to look forward to seeing the Fanbus crew moving around and goofing off on screen.
Looking Ahead
The announcement comes with almost no production detail. No animation studio, director, series composition writer, or voice cast has been named, and the official site confirms only the 2027 broadcast year. No season or network has been set. Streaming rights for international markets have not been announced either, which is normal this far ahead of a broadcast.
English readers can start now. Viz Media publishes Phantom Busters under its Shonen Jump imprint, with volume 4 out since July 7 and volume 5 arriving October 6. Digital chapters run on the Shonen Jump app and MANGA Plus, and Viz moved the series to simulpub in September 2026, so new chapters land in English the same week they run in Japan. That puts English readers roughly seven volumes into the story before the anime has a studio attached.