The 44th issue of Shuiesha’s Weekly Shonen Jump announced that the manga creator duo Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata will launch a new title, Platinum End, in the December issue of Jump SQ due out November 4th. The October 5th issue of Viz Media’s digital Weekly Shonen Jump then announced that it would be simulpubing the story,  not in the magazine itself, but as individual chapters.

Platinum End has been teased to be about “humans and angels”. It will follow Mirai Kakehashi, a boy “who does not seek out hope in order to live.”

Ohba and Obata have had two very successful titles released in the west, Death Note and Bakuman. Viz will be releasing each chapter of this new series for .99 each. This is a format that is becoming popular among manga publishers. Yen Press is simulpubing new chapters of Black Butler the same way, for the same price. It appears to be experimental, so it will be interesting to see how popular it becomes.

Also announced by Viz’s Weekly Shonen Jump to appear in the magazine, is the debut one-shot by Naruto‘s Masashi Kishimoto, Karakuri. It is a sci-fi action series about Kiru, a Karakuri, who is part of an elite unit that hunts Roido, human biological weapons. It was first printed in 1998, and won Kishimoto the Hop Step Award for new manga artists. Kishimoto had hinted that his next series would be sci-fi. I wonder if he meant that he would got back to this series, or something new.