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Though he’s been through some difficult personal and financial times, Masami Kurumada is still going ahead with his most popular series, Saint Seiya. More than 40 years after the first chapter of Saint Seiya was published, the next arc is coming later this year as Saint Seiya: The Heavens Arc Part 4 is getting published. It will be the first new chapter of the iconic manga since May 2026.

The announcement came just a few weeks after Masami Kurumada announced that one of his former employees, who served as both his manager and an executive at his manga studio, had embezzled nearly $30 million from the company over a ten-year period. On December 18, 2026, Saint Seiya: The Heavens Arc Part 4 will be published in Champion RED magazine.

The Saint Seiya: The Heavens Arc manga is the latest in a long line of sequels to the original Saint Seiya manga. It is a direct sequel to Saint Seiya: Next Dimension – The Myth of Hades, which was serialized from April 2006 to July 2024. Over the past 40 years, more than 35 million copies of Saint Seiya have been printed. The entire time, Masami Kurumada has been the artist and writer of the series.

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Unlike many other manga, Saint Seiya: The Heavens Arc Part 4 will not be serialized over multiple weeks or months. The entire entry, which is likely to be only a handful of full-color pages, will be published on December 18, 2026. It feels like a good sign that whatever lingering issues Kurumada has had following the embezzlement scandal have been resolved and he’s ready to continue building on his substantial legacy in the industry.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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