Bamboo Blade Writer Launches Master Grape Manga

The November issue of Shogakukan's Monthly Shonen Sunday launched Masahiro Totsuka (Bamboo Blade) and Akira Takahashi's Master Grape manga on Wednesday. Totsuka is in charge of the story, and Takahashi is drawing the series. The manga's first chapter includes an opening color page.

Monthly Shonen Sunday's official website describes Master Grape as an action comedy fighting manga with a variety of weapons, such as swords, spears, sticks, and staffs. The story follows Yūta Sakura, a third-year middle school student who boasts about his "invincible strength" in arcade fighting games. At the game center he meets another boy named Takemichi Umesaki , and then gets entangled with a group of delinquents. A swordsman, Azuya Momoyama, happens to pass by. The delinquents are defeated by a strange weapon and a strange fighting style. Yūta is inspired and, along with Takemichi, begins to learn about weapons.

Totsuka and Jingu Takao's Bamboo Blade C manga ended in Square Enix's Monthly Big Gangan magazine in August. Totsuka and Saki Azumi's BB Deformer spin-off manga ended in the same issue. The final compiled book volumes for both series — Bamboo Blade C's seventh volume and BB Deformer's second volume — will ship in Japan on October 25.

Totsuka and artist Aguri Igarashi (Saki Achiga-hen episode of side-A) already ended the first Bamboo Blade manga series in 2010, and Yen Press published it in North America. AIC A.S.T.A. adapted the manga into a television anime series in 2007-2008, and Funimation released the anime in North America. Totsuka and Studio Neko ended the second manga series, Bamboo Blade B, in Monthly Shonen Gangan in November 2013.​