Black Clover returns with episode 171, five months after the manga ended
The anime's new season picks up five and a half years after the first run ended in March 2021. The manga finished in Jump GIGA on May 1, 2026.
Black Clover's anime is back, and it's back with episode 171. The new season premiered on TV Tokyo on October 3, 2026, five and a half years after the first run ended and five months after the manga it adapts came to an end.
The industry calls it season 2. The episode count says something else. The first run was a single 170-episode series that aired from October 2017 to March 2021. The new premiere, "The Battle Begins" (Kaisen), is numbered 171. This is not a second season in the usual sense. It is the same show picking up after a gap of more than five years.
The anime stopped. The manga didn't.
When the TV series went off the air in March 2021, Yūki Tabata's manga was still running weekly in Weekly Shōnen Jump. What happened to it next is the real story behind this return.
- April 2022: the manga goes on a three-month hiatus to prepare its final arc.
- August 21, 2023: it ends its run in Weekly Shōnen Jump after more than eight years.
- December 25, 2023: it resumes in Jump GIGA.
- May 1, 2026: it finishes with three chapters published in Jump GIGA.
- August 4, 2026: the 38th and final volume is released.
- September 2026: the series passes 25 million copies in circulation worldwide.
So the anime is returning to a story whose ending already exists in print. For a long-running shōnen adaptation, that is unusual. Most of them spend their later years trying not to catch up with the manga. Black Clover's TV return doesn't have to worry about that.
What happened in between
The franchise didn't disappear entirely while the TV anime was off the air. The film Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King premiered in June 2023, in Japanese cinemas and on Netflix internationally at the same time. Crunchyroll then announced the new season at Anime Expo in July 2025, with a teaser. A full trailer followed at Jump Festa '26 in December 2025, and a second one, built around the new opening, at Anime Expo in July 2026.
Before any of that, the first animated Black Clover was not Pierrot's at all. Xebec Zwei made an original video animation in 2017, the same year the TV series began.
The English-language audience has been along since 2015
The international fan base this season is aimed at was built early. Viz Media announced on February 9, 2015, a week before the manga's Japanese debut, that it would publish the first three chapters in its Weekly Shonen Jump digital magazine under its Jump Start programme. On March 30, 2015, Viz said the series would join its weekly lineup from the fourth chapter on April 6, publishing at an accelerated rate until it caught up with Japan.
The franchise also branched out along the way. A manga based on the video game Black Clover: Quartet Knights ran on the Shōnen Jump+ app from October 7, 2018, to April 12, 2020.
Who is making it
- Studio: Pierrot, which also produced the original 170 episodes.
- Director: Ayataka Tanemura, who also storyboarded episode 171.
- Episode 171: directed by Toshihiro Maeya and written by Keiichirō Ōchi, with Itsuko Takeda and Kosei Takahashi as chief animation directors.
- Opening theme: "Kienai Riyū" (The Reason It Won't Fade Away) by WANIMA.
- Ending theme: "Yellow Brick Road" by One or Eight.
- Broadcast: TV Tokyo and its TXN affiliates.
The premiere doesn't ease anyone in. The Qliphoth Gate opens in three days, and Asta and Liebe are training under Nacht in his Devil Union mode, trying to pull off Devil Union themselves. It is the middle of the final war, not a new beginning.
A finished manga is an advantage and a test
The gap gives the anime something most long shōnen adaptations never get: a fixed destination. Pierrot knows how the story ends, how many chapters are left, and where it needs to land. There is no reason for filler arcs or a stall while the source material catches up.
It also raises the bar. Readers who followed the manga to May 2026 know every turn of the final arc. The anime can't rely on surprise for them. It has to win on execution, and it has to do it for an audience that has waited five and a half years.
What hasn't been announced
- The episode count. Neither the season's length nor the number of episodes needed to finish the story has been confirmed.
- Whether this is the final run. With the manga complete, an adaptation to the end is the obvious plan, but no one has said it out loud.
The anime went off the air in 2021 with the story unfinished. The manga ended in May 2026. In October, the anime came back to tell the rest, starting at episode 171.