Soul Eater

• 1. Introduction

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  Atsushi Ohkubo's manga Soul Eater runs on a strict counting rule. A living weapon must absorb the souls of 99 evil humans, followed by one witch, in exactly that order. Break the sequence and the tally starts over from zero. A rule like that raises obvious questions. Who enforces it, and what do the students gain by obeying? How did a few short stories grow into a long-running series that reached television and game consoles? And how did critics weigh its gothic look against its fanservice and familiar formulas?

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• 2. Death City Academy

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  Death City, a fictional town in Nevada, United States, is home to the Death Weapon Meister Academy, called DWMA for short. Its headmaster is Shinigami, the personification of death, who is also known simply as Death. The school trains humans who can transform into weapons, along with the people who wield them, known as meisters. Every student works toward the same prize. A weapon that absorbs the required souls gains dramatically more power and becomes a Death Scythe, one of the arms Shinigami himself uses.

  Three teams carry the story. Maka Albarn is a meister, and her partner, Soul Eater, turns into a scythe. The assassin Black Star is paired with Tsubaki Nakatsukasa, who can take the form of various ninja weapons. Death the Kid is Shinigami's own son, and his partners, Liz and Patty Thompson, become pistols.

  Their ambitions are soon tested by Medusa, a witch with plans of her own.

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• 3. Witches and Madness

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  Medusa has a child named Crona, who is the meister of a demon sword called Ragnarok. She forces Crona to collect the souls of humans who are not evil, so that Crona will eventually become a kishin, an evil god. Medusa and her followers then attack the academy to revive Asura, the first kishin. Asura once came close to plunging the whole world into madness, until Shinigami sealed him beneath the school. Maka, Black Star and Death the Kid fight together, yet Medusa's group succeeds. After a brief clash with Shinigami, the revived Asura leaves to spread chaos across the world. Franken Stein, a meister and DWMA teacher, seemingly kills Medusa, and Crona surrenders and enrolls at the school.

  Asura's spreading madness lures Arachne, Medusa's sister, out of hiding. She rebuilds her organization, Arachnophobia, which becomes a serious threat to the academy. Shinigami summons Death Scythes from around the world to help. Then Medusa returns, her soul now inside the body of a young girl, and offers a truce so both sides can destroy Arachnophobia. Students and Medusa's entourage infiltrate the group's headquarters, where Maka kills Arachne. Medusa then betrays the academy, takes over Arachne's body and brainwashes Crona into rejoining her.

  Death the Kid, meanwhile, is captured by Noah, an artificial construct created from the Book of Eibon. Maka uses Arachne's soul to turn Soul into a Death Scythe. The pair join Spartoi, a newly formed meister unit, whose members rescue Kid and defeat Noah.

  A city in Russia suffers next, when Crona resurfaces and destroys it along with the Death Scythe stationed there. Medusa provokes Crona into killing her, and Crona is taken by insanity. Shinigami orders Maka to hunt Crona down. While searching with her powers, Maka unwittingly detects Asura's hiding place on a cartoonish moon within the atmosphere.

  The assault on that moon unites old enemies. Death the Kid persuades the witches to form a temporary alliance, and they help the academy fight. During the battle, Crona absorbs Asura's body but is overtaken by him. Maka, Black Star and Kid restore Crona's sanity and seal Asura on the moon using his own blood. Crona willingly stays behind to keep him imprisoned, and Maka promises to rescue Crona one day. Back on Earth, Kid becomes the new Shinigami after his father's death and establishes a peace treaty with the witches. Soul is declared the last Death Scythe.

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• 4. From One-Shots to Series

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  Atsushi Ohkubo had just finished his first manga series, B.Ichi, when he wrote a one-shot called Soul Eater. It appeared in a summer special edition of Gangan Powered on the 24th of June 2003. Japanese readers were so taken with it that Ohkubo followed with two more one-shots, Black Star and Death the Kid. Black Star ran in an autumn special edition of Gangan Powered on the 22nd of September. Death the Kid appeared in Gangan Wing on the 26th of November 2003. With results that strong, the editor of Gangan Comics asked Ohkubo to build a series from the stories, and the one-shots became its introductory chapters.

  Tim Burton's animations and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter both shaped the series, Ohkubo said in an interview. Ideas from the first and concepts from the second fed into his world.

  Maka Albarn is a girl by design. Ohkubo made his lead female to depart from the traditional male hero of shōnen manga, the genre aimed at young male readers. He also paired the main characters with partners of the opposite sex, to show equal representation of gender.

  The title does not point to the character Soul Eater Evans. Ohkubo said it refers to Asura and his hunger to eat innocent souls.

  When he started, Ohkubo already had the plot and details such as the academy fully formed, and he had shared them with his editors. He felt that too many manga reveal their characters through flashbacks, a technique he considered too clever. Instead he developed his cast in the present and concentrated on "action and momentum," so that he could "write freely."

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• 5. Pages and Volumes

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  On the 12th of May 2004, Soul Eater began its run in Square Enix's Monthly Shōnen Gangan magazine. It ended there after nine years, on the 12th of August 2013. Square Enix gathered the 113 chapters into 25 tankōbon volumes, the bound collections sold in bookstores, under its Gangan Comics imprint. They were released between the 22nd of June 2004 and the 12th of December 2013. A 17-volume kanzenban edition, titled Soul Eater: The Perfect Edition, followed from the 12th of July 2019 to the 12th of March 2020.

  North American readers met the series through Yen Press. Its Yen Plus anthology magazine began serializing the manga, and the first issue went on sale on the 29th of July 2008. The first English volume arrived on the 27th of October 2009, and the last on the 24th of March 2015. In July 2019, Square Enix announced an English release of The Perfect Edition. Its 17 volumes appeared from the 28th of July 2020 to the 4th of February 2025.

  A second Ohkubo manga, Soul Eater Not!, ran alongside the main series. It was serialized in Monthly Shōnen Gangan from the 12th of January 2011 to the 10th of November 2014. Five tankōbon volumes came out between the 22nd of September 2011 and the 22nd of December 2014. Yen Press licensed it too, and its five English volumes were released between the 24th of July 2012 and the 4th of August 2015.

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• 6. From Page to Screen

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  On the 31st of August 2005, Square Enix released a drama CD of Soul Eater, bundled with an art book and a script of the dialogue. Only one cast member carried over to the later anime. That was Yumiko Kobayashi, the voice actress of Black Star.

  Director Takuya Igarashi led the 51-episode anime at Bones, with Aniplex, Dentsu, Media Factory and TV Tokyo also producing. Bones handled the animation, and Aniplex handled the music. Akatsuki Yamatoya wrote the scenario, basing the story on Ohkubo's original concept. Yoshiyuki Ito headed the character design, Norifumi Nakamura directed the art, and Shinji Aramaki created the conceptual design.

  TV Tokyo aired the episodes between the 7th of April 2008 and the 30th of March 2009. Two animated specials aired on the 29th of May and the 1st of June 2008. Viewers could watch the regular evening broadcast or a late-night version called the Soul Eater Late Show, which included special footage. The network billed this dual schedule as the "world's first evening and late-night resonance broadcast." The word borrows from a story concept, in which Maka and Soul reach maximum power by synchronizing their souls.

  Media Factory collected the episodes on thirteen DVDs, released from the 22nd of August 2008 to the 25th of August 2009. TV Tokyo rebroadcast the series on the 30th of September 2010 with new opening and closing themes. On the 26th of February 2014, Media Factory and Kadokawa merged two earlier Blu-ray box sets into one.

  In North America, Funimation, later Crunchyroll, licensed the anime. It released the series in four half-season DVD box sets, starting in February 2010. The show reached North American television on Funimation Channel in September 2010. Adult Swim's Toonami block later ran it from the 17th of February 2013 to the 16th of March 2014.

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• 7. Music and Games

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  Six pieces of theme music frame the anime's episodes, two openings and four endings. "Resonance" by T.M.Revolution opens the first 30 episodes, and "Papermoon" by Tommy heavenly6 takes over from episode 31. "I Wanna Be" by Stance Punks closes episodes 1-13 and episode 51. "Style" by Kana Nishino covers episodes 14-26. Diggy-Mo of Soul'd Out sings the third ending for episodes 27-39, and "Strength" by Abingdon Boys School closes episodes 40 through 50.

  The rebroadcast added two more openings and two more endings. "Counter Identity" by Unison Square Garden is the first opening, paired with an ending by Yui Makino. The second opening is by Shion Tsuji, and the second ending is "Northern Lights" by How Merry Marry.

  Aniplex also released three character song maxi singles in 2008. The first, on the 6th of August, was sung by Chiaki Omigawa as Maka and Kōki Uchiyama as Soul. The second, on the 3rd of September, paired Yumiko Kobayashi as Black Star with Kaori Nazuka as Tsubaki. The third, on the 1st of October, featured Mamoru Miyano as Kid, Akeno Watanabe as Liz and Narumi Takahira as Patty. Taku Iwasaki composed and produced the anime's two soundtrack CDs. Original Soundtrack 1 came out on the 27th of August 2008 with 20 tracks, and Original Soundtrack 2 followed on the 18th of March 2009 with 22 tracks.

  Three video games grew out of the series. The first is an action-adventure game exclusive to the Wii, developed by Square Enix with Bones and released in Japan on the 25th of September 2008. Ohkubo designed two original characters for it. Ponera is the titular Monotone Princess, and Grimoire is the character known as Noah in the manga. Its theme song, "Soul's Crossing," is sung by T.M.Revolution and included on the "Resonance" single. A soundtrack CD went out as a pre-order bonus.

  Namco Bandai Games produced the second game, an action title for the Nintendo DS, released on the 23rd of October 2008. It is a third-person hack-and-slash that resembles the Wii game, even though two different companies made them. The third game, released on the 29th of January 2009, is a fighting game developed by BEC and produced by Namco Bandai Games for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable. It follows the first 24 episodes of the anime, and players train and battle as the characters did, with new costumes and items.

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• 8. Sales and Critics

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  In 2008, Soul Eater was the seventh best-selling manga, with 3,076,351 copies sold. By October 2012 more than 13 million copies were in circulation. The total reached 18.2 million worldwide by April 2018 and 19.6 million by July 2019. By February 2022 it stood above 20.4 million.

  Danielle Leigh of Comic Book Resources praised the first volume's stylish visuals. She likened Ohkubo's art to Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride, and noted how well it paired with references to Jack the Ripper and Frankenstein. She also criticized the excessive fanservice and called the art style "pattern-oriented, shallow." Penny Kenny of Manga Life awarded a B+, commending the dynamic action and art styles that range from Blade of the Immortal to Yu-Gi-Oh! to Burton-esque looks. Julian Gnam of Otaku USA liked the weapon-meister dynamics but found the plot conventional and the fanservice excessive. He did note that the series is accessible to casual readers.

  Chris Zimmerman of Comic Book Bin rated the second volume 7.5/10. He praised the creative character designs and action, but faulted the lack of character development and the formulaic shōnen structure. Shaenon Garrity of About.com was harsher, giving the first two volumes 2 out of 5 stars. She described the world as a "hyperkinetic Halloween" that resembles Shaman King, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and she criticized its "bland characters" and "meandering story." Nicholas Dupree of Anime News Network gave The Perfect Edition a B+ for its unique charm and gothic aesthetics. He felt, however, that its humor has aged poorly, and he criticized its excessive sexualized material.

  The anime drew warmer notices for its gothic look and energy. Casey Brienza of Anime News Network granted that the tournament tropes are conventional. Even so, she judged the Burton-inspired visuals, which she compared to Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, more stylistically refined than those of the comparable D.Gray-man. Jacob Hope Chapman called the show visually imaginative, explosive great fun. James Brusuelas of Animation World Network described it as "a series that takes the guilt out of your guilty pleasure."

  Holly Ellingwood of Active Anime singled out the "zany yet creepy" quality of the animation. Sandra Scholes praised its "dark humour in a Gothic vein," saw similarities to D.Gray-man and Bleach, and found the art reminiscent of Gorillaz videos. Chris Zimmerman awarded the series an A-, admiring the cinematic design from studio Bones and its "eye pleasing animation." He later gave the Meister Collection Blu-ray set an A+ for balancing "flashy fights and themes of friendship" with exceptional production values.

  Several reviewers focused on the Western influences. Jason Green said its death god ideas run on the energy of Gurren Lagann rather than the seriousness of Death Note, with characters inspired by Jack the Ripper and The Blair Witch Project. Paul Chapman noted the American horror motifs and varied architecture, and called the ending competent but not particularly innovative. Serdar Yegulalp praised the "gloriously absurd wide-scale action" of the finale, which recalled Gurren Lagann and Neon Genesis Evangelion.

  Recognition followed. The series ranked sixth in Charles Solomon's Los Angeles Times list of the top ten anime series, and Yegulalp featured it in his essential anime guide. Kara Dennison placed it among Crunchyroll's recommended Halloween anime. Stephanie Donaldson and Jacki Jing of Anime News Network listed it among the anime that deserve reboots. At the 12th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2008, it was one of the Jury Recommended Works.

  The series' 20th anniversary brought an art exhibition to Tokyo's Space Galleria, from the 23rd of August to the 23rd of September 2024. It moved to Osaka's Space Gratus from the 25th of October to the 25th of November the same year. A special video featuring Chiaki Omigawa and Kōki Uchiyama, the voice actors of Maka and Soul, was released alongside a teaser visual for the event.

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