Naoki Urasawa is launching a new series about AI in Shogakukan's Big Comic Original this August, titled The Last Manga Classroom.

Big Comic Original has been Urasawa's creative home since his debut in 1985 with Pineapple Army. Most recently, he penned Mujirushi: The Sign of Dreams for the magazine: a mystery series produced in collaboration with the Louvre and even featuring a character from Fujio Akatsuka's Osomatsu-kun. It also serialized Monster and Billy Bat from 1994 to 2001 and 2003 to 2009 respectively.

That being said, no one would've expected Urasawa to take on yet another project at this point in time. His latest series Asadora! began in 2018 and is still ongoing, despite many hiatuses. Speaking via X, the artist himself remarked that "Between Asadora! and a new series... wow, I'm busy."

Looking at the teaser image, the inspiration for this new series is easy to see. The caption surrounding the title on the left side reads "In a epoch where AI can do everything for you, what will Urasawa do?" On the right side, there is also some kind of figure that appears to be saying "That kind of thing will never die."

As an manga artist, Urasawa has been notoriously outspoken about changes to the medium. While all of his works were published in digital for the very first time in 2021, he remained skeptical about the prospect, asking his publishers to put a special mark at the beginning of each ebook to encourage reading in landscape instead of portrait.

Given the threat that generative AI poses to all creative mediums, let alone just manga, what will Urasawa have to say on the subject? We'll just have to wait until August 12, when the first chapter of The Last Manga Classroom hits store shelves in Japan.