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THE HEART
Tite Kubo (born Noriaki Kubo; "Tite" is pronounced "Tight") is the creator of Zombie Powder and the incredibly popular series Bleach. He has several often parodied weaknesses as a manga-ka (eschewing backgrounds, slow pace, Only Six Faces--which has improved since the beginning-- Plotkai, and creating new characters to substitute lack of plot ideas). Despite this (or perhaps because of it), Bleach remained for quite a while as one of the most popular Shonen manga in circulation today, partly due to the large amount of interesting characters and partly due to the sheer number of awesome moments the series has produced. His color cover pages always have characters in very trendy outfits.
Is widely considered as a Trolling Creator, to the point of trolling demigod. If not a downright candidate for Magnificent Bastard considering how he keeps a big part of the fandom riled up constantly no matter what he does. Here's his current Twitter account (he dropped the original one, tite_kubo, after he was harrassed by porn actor who plagiarized its contents to make anime parodies [and not due to fan bullying, as it's been believed for years]), and he's also good friends with fellow author Mayu Shinjo, based on their tweets.
When through said Twitter account he heard that Nick Simmons' comic Incarnate plagiarized his own works, he responded simply--
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"Between last night and this morning, I've been getting a lot of messages from overseas fans along the lines of 'There's an American comic ripping off Bleach!' I'm not that good at English, but I looked at the site and it seems it's a comic by Nick Simmons, the son of Gene Simmons. To be honest, I'm more bothered by the fact that Gene Simmons' son is a comic artist than whether or not it's a rip-off..." |
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After the end of the Bleach manga in 2016, Kubo more or less took a break — which he badly needed, due to his frail health. As of 2020, his main works have been the short story Burn the Witch (a 2018 mini Spin Off from Bleach, showing a bit of how Hollows are handled within the United Kingdom; it's been expanded to a 4-part story, and it got 3 OAV's by Studio Colorado in late 2020) and the character design in the sixth Sakura Taisen game, released in 2019. The Bleach anime itself, which stopped in 2012, returned in 2022 as the Bleach: the Thousand Years Blood War series, divided in four Cours that adapt the last arc; the first one was aired in 2022, two more followed through 2023 and 2024, and it's believed the last one will be aired in mid-late 2025 or VERY early 2026. And last but not least, a one-shot story that may or may not be the basis for a whole new storyline was released in October 2021: its tentative name is The Jaws from Hell arc.