Bleach (stylized as BLEACH) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Tite Kubo. It follows the adventures of the hotheaded teenager Ichigo Kurosaki, who inherits his parents’ destiny after he obtains the powers of a Soul Reaper—a death personification similar to the Grim Reaper—from another Soul Reaper, Rukia Kuchiki. His new-found powers force him to take on the duties of defending humans from evil spirits and guiding departed souls to the afterlife, and set him on journeys to various ghostly realms of existence.

Bleach was serialized in Shueisha‘s shōnen (teenage males) manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump from August 2001 to August 2016, with its chapters collected in seventy-four tankōbon volumes. The series has spawned a media franchise that includes an anime television series adaptation that was produced by Tokyo-based studio Pierrot from 2004 to 2012, two original video animation (OVA) episodes, four animated feature films, ten stage musicals, and numerous video games, as well as many types of Bleach-related merchandise. A Japanese live-action film adaptation produced by Warner Bros. was released in 2018.

In North America, the manga was licensed for English release by Viz Media in 2004. They have released its seventy-four volumes and published its chapters in their Shonen Jump magazine from November 2007 until the magazine’s final issue in April 2012.

Bleach received the 50th Shogakukan Manga Award for the shōnen category in 2005. Despite significant downturns in both the Japanese and English manga markets, Bleach continued to perform well commercially, and had over 120 million tankōbon volumes in circulation worldwide as of 2018, making it the eleventh best-selling manga in history.

Bleach
First tankōbon volume cover, featuring Ichigo Kurosaki
Genre	Adventure, supernatural
Manga
Written by	Tite Kubo
Published by	Shueisha
English publisher	AUS Madman Entertainment NA Viz Media
Imprint	Jump Comics
Magazine	Weekly Shōnen Jump
English magazine	NA Shonen Jump (former) Weekly Shonen Jump
Demographic	Shōnen
Original run	August 7, 2001 – August 22, 2016
Volumes	74 (List of volumes)
Anime television series
Bleach (2004–2012) Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War (2022–scheduled)
Anime films
Memories of Nobody (2006) The DiamondDust Rebellion (2007) Fade to Black (2008) Hell Verse (2010)
Live-action film
Bleach (2018)