Clayman Gets April, Rimuru Comes Back in July
Season 4 has been running as a split five-cour project since April 3, 2026, with the first two cours airing back to back through late September. Japanese entertainment news site Oricon News reported that the third cour starts in July 2027. The spinoff gets the earlier slot, landing in April 2027, three months ahead of Rimuru's return.
Eight Bit handles Clayman's Revenge. The studio has animated the main Slime series since its October 2018 debut and also produced Blue Lock. Kentarō Sugimoto directs, with Yūji Haibara on series composition and character designs by Asumi Hashimoto and Hideki Sakai. Takehito Koyasu (Zeke Yeager in Attack on Titan, Dio Brando in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure) returns as Clayman, the part he voiced in Season 2. The spinoff manga credits Wataru Kajika as artist alongside Fuse and original character designer Mitz Vah.
What Clayman's Revenge Actually Is
Clayman ruled the puppet nation ジスターヴ (likely Jistav) as the Marionette Master, a schemer who manipulated others and aimed at controlling the world, until a single slime broke his ambitions apart. Oricon frames him as the Demon Lord whose presence set the course for how Rimuru would live afterward. The spinoff asks what would have happened if his life had gone another way, presenting itself as a story that might have existed inside the franchise's history.
Anime News Network's report on the manga spells out the mechanism: as Clayman dies at the Walpurgis Festival, he acquires a unique skill called Regressor and wakes up in his own room seventy years earlier. The manga runs in Kodansha's Monthly Shonen Sirius.
The parent series follows Satoru Mikami, an office worker stabbed to death by a random attacker who wakes up in another world as a slime. As Rimuru, he works toward a country where any race can live comfortably, using the skills he acquires and winning allies through wit and nerve. It began as a web novel on Shōsetsuka ni Narō, the Japanese user-submission novel site, picked up a manga adaptation by Taiki Kawakami, and the franchise has now passed 62 million copies in circulation. The anime started in October 2018, split Season 2 across two halves in 2021, ran Season 3 from April to September 2024, and released theatrical films in 2022 and 2026.
Fuse Pitched It on a Whim
Fuse says the spinoff started as a passing idea. The project rolled forward so smoothly after he brought it up that he found it nerve-racking as the author who proposed it. His description of the original concept is a single image: Clayman, entirely serious, dressing down a subordinate while the glass in his hand tilts and spills wine onto his pure white suit, then working frantically to cover the stain before anyone notices how uncool he looks. That was funny enough on its own to build a series on, he writes.
He had plotted it out figuring two volumes would be a decent run. Fan response was better than that, and he now says he wants to keep it going as long as he can, with occasional serious Clayman material mixed into what is mostly a comedy.
Kajika, the artist, says getting to draw a Slime spinoff at all felt like a miracle, and that the anime news did not feel real to him for a while. He mentions being shown the anime character designs and sitting in on a recording session, and singles out one thing he is waiting for: seeing Clayman's army animated.
The Collaboration Video
The announcement arrived with a special video built as a crossover between Season 4 and the spinoff, newly animated by Eight Bit. It drops Clayman into the middle of Rimuru's banter with his partner, the Wisdom King (智慧之王), producing the kind of comic exchange between Clayman and Rimuru that Season 2 never showed. It went up on isekai channel, Bandai Namco Filmworks' YouTube channel.
Looking Ahead
Crunchyroll streams Season 4 with English subtitles and an English dub across North and South America, Europe, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, CIS and Southeast Asia, so the July 2027 cour will most likely land there too. No distributor has been named for Clayman's Revenge yet.
The spinoff manga is already readable in English on K MANGA, Kodansha's official manga app. Kawakami's main-series manga is also published in English by Kodansha. Neither announcement came with a cast list beyond Koyasu, so the rest of Clayman's army has yet to be filled in.
(c) Taiki Kawakami, Fuse, Kodansha / Tensura Project