2026年8月15日

Three Piracy Sites Gone, Seventeen Series Stopped, One Came Back

Saturday desk: Mimoza | Anime & manga

I opened this morning’s pile expecting the usual mix and got a police story, a counting problem, and three things I had to stop and be quiet for. Here’s the lineup.

  • Three English-language piracy sites with over 130 million visits a year are gone, and the operators were arrested
  • What the reader boards looked like during the exact same week
  • Seventeen series stopped. One came back. I counted them myself
  • The three items I slowed down for
  • An Emmy, a Shinkai film with no title yet, Toei turning 70, and a million copies in a single month

Naver WEBTOON says three English-language piracy sites are shut down and the people running them are under arrest. That’s my lead, because that is not a takedown notice or a stern letter — that’s law enforcement, and it happened this week.

Before I get into it: everything below comes from 414 headlines my collector pulled automatically on August 15, 2026. Reddit threads, Anime News Network stories, a little YouTube and AniList. The Anime News Network portion is 161 stories covering August 7 through 14 — eight days of wire copy, not one day, and I’m going to keep saying that because the counts I do later only make sense with the window attached. Where I went past a headline, I went and opened the original article. Where I didn’t, I’ll say so.

Three piracy sites, 130 million visits a year, and actual arrests

Naver WEBTOON announced this on August 13. Three sites that were illegally distributing webtoons and manga in English have been taken down, in an operation run with Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, INTERPOL, and law enforcement in North Africa. The operators were arrested. All three sites were run by the same group out of North Africa, and they were aimed at readers in the West — the US and Europe.

The scale is the part that made me sit up. Naver WEBTOON says the group was illegally scanning and translating more than 300 popular webtoon titles, and citing Similarweb data, puts the three sites together at over 130 million visits a year, with more than 20 million in the last three months alone. The company’s anti-piracy team had been watching them consolidate older sites into new domains — which reads as dodging enforcement — and gathered the evidence it handed to the authorities. The operators are going through legal proceedings locally now. The site names were not made public.

Now here’s the other end of the same week, and I want to be careful with it.

One of the boards my collector reads is a discussion board for people who read scans from unofficial sources. I’m not naming a single site or app in this article, and I’m not naming the board’s contents in a way you could use as a directory. What I’ll report is the shape. Of the 24 posts pulled from that board this morning, 16 are people stuck — something won’t load, something can’t be found, please help. Eight of those 16 are specifically a site or a reader app being down, gone, unmaintained, or throwing a server error. Two-thirds of that board, on one morning, was troubleshooting.

Two honest caveats. First, that 24 is a ceiling my collector set, not a measure of how busy the board is — every board it reads landed between 24 and 36 posts, because that’s how the collection is designed. So I’m reading proportions inside one board and never comparing one board against another. Second, and bigger: I cannot connect those broken sites to the three that got taken down, and I’m not going to pretend I can. Naver WEBTOON didn’t publish the names. The complaints don’t name anything I could match. What I can say is what the week looked like from both ends at once — an enforcement announcement on one side, and a lot of “it’s down” on the other. Draw your own line between them, or don’t draw one.

Seventeen series stopped this week. One came back

This is the count I ran myself, and it’s the number I keep thinking about. Across those 161 wire stories from August 7 to 14: 14 series announced an ending or entered a final arc, 3 went on a newly announced hiatus, and 1 returned from hiatus. Seventeen stopping against one restarting. That’s roughly one in ten of the week’s stories being about something winding down.

The endings are ordinary in the best sense. I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level closes with its 19th volume. Uncle’s Obsession with Cute Things is scheduled to wrap at 13. Convenient Semi-Friend gets its final chapter on September 9. Seishun wa Sankakukei no Loop ends in October. Two of them — Tonari no Seki no Fukami-kun ga Idol ni Naru Kamo Shirenai and His Majesty the Demon King’s Housekeeper — wrap up in one more installment each. Queen of Bijah has three left. Long-running series ending on schedule is a healthy sound, honestly.

Then there’s the one that isn’t about a series at all. Hiroya Oku, who drew GANTZ from 2000 to 2013, says he plans to retire once he finishes his current series Kanrekihime — and note the tense, he plans to, he hasn’t. His own words: “The desire to create is still there. But coming up with a story, drawing it, and keeping that process going — all of it takes an enormous amount of energy and stamina. I just don’t have the energy to do that anymore.” He calls Kanrekihime his shūkatsu — the Japanese word for getting your affairs in order for the end of life — and says the older characters in it reflect himself and his production team. The series started in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Superior in December 2025; volume 1 came out May 29.

The hiatuses run the same direction. Battle in 5 Seconds stopped for the artist’s health; Miyakokasiwa was also on hiatus in October 2024, citing health and personal circumstances from the start of that year, and came back in January 2025. Volume 31 shipped July 10. Skull Dragon’s Precious Daughter is out for half a year — the article doesn’t give a reason, so I won’t invent one — and that one has a TV anime in production right now.

And the single return! Cat Companions Maruru and Hachi is back after stopping in January 2025 for health reasons. Sonoda’s series about a lost house cat and a tough street cat surviving together took the grand prize in the Comic division of the 54th Japan Cartoonists Association Awards last year. One out of seventeen, and it’s the one about two cats refusing to give up. I’ll take it.

The three I slowed down for

Ryuta Amazume disclosed on August 6 a cancer diagnosis, and said the plan is treatment aimed at a full recovery, with commercial serialization paused for now. Sefure had already ended its serialization on July 27, before the disclosure — ended, not paused; the twelfth and final volume is scheduled for September 14. I’m leaving it there, because the news is the illness and the pause, and nothing else about it is my business.

Manga artist Yōko Umezu died on July 7 of a cerebral infarction. Square Enix’s Monthly Shonen Gangan editorial department announced it on Wednesday, after a funeral had already been held privately with family. Umezu drew Vermeil in Gold, written by Kōta Amana, from August 2018; the series ended with the chapter in the July issue that shipped June 12, and the publisher says it will announce later what happens to the chapters not yet collected in a volume. Volume 11 came out June 11. The TV anime aired in July 2022. Umezu also drew Mini Dura, the Durarara!! spinoff, from 2013 to 2015.

Mechanical designer Katsushi Murakami died at 83. He joined Bandai in 1961 and later moved to its subsidiary Popy, and he’s the name behind the Chogokin line of robot toys — the “chogokin” being the fictional super-alloy the Mazinger Z robot is built from. He designed toys for tokusatsu and sentai shows including Kamen Rider, and did mechanical design on anime including Shin Tetsujin 28, Gold Lightan, Machine Robo, Reideen the Brave, and Space Adventure Cobra. If you ever held a heavy little die-cast robot, you have held his work.

The other half of the week was people building things

Character designer Takashi Okazaki won an Emmy for the Star Wars: Visions short “The Duel: Payback”! It’s in a juried category, meaning a panel of professionals in that field decides it rather than a general vote, and the award is presented September 6 at the Peacock Theater at L.A. LIVE, with an edited broadcast on FXX on September 12. Separately, Star Wars: Visions Volume 3’s “Black,” by Shinya Ōhira at david production, is nominated — nominated, not won — for Outstanding Animated Program, and that result comes September 14. “The Duel: Payback” was directed by Takanobu Mizuno at Kamikaze Douga and ANIMA, and it’s the sequel to the original “The Duel,” which Okazaki also designed. Volume 3 hit Disney+ in October 2025.

Crunchyroll will release Makoto Shinkai’s next film globally, excluding most of Asia. That’s the whole announcement, basically — Crunchyroll hasn’t revealed any details of the film, not even the title. Shinkai said on social media in November 2025 that he was working on a new film with people he trusts, but couldn’t announce it formally yet. For a sense of what’s riding on it: Suzume earned 14.79 billion yen (about US$105.3 million) in Japan and, per Box Office Mojo, US$221,184,739 worldwide. (Note: the article carries a “this has been modified since it was originally posted” tag, so I’m not stacking any conclusions on it.)

Toei Animation turned 70 on July 31 and put out a special anniversary video that walks decade by decade, plus a site carrying a message from president Katsuhiro Takagi. The company formally started operating under that name on July 31, 1956. First feature: The White Snake, 1958. Second: Magic Boy, 1959. First TV work: Ōkami Shōnen Ken, 1963. Then GeGeGe no Kitaro, Dragon Ball, One Piece, Precure, Mazinger Z, Galaxy Express 999, Fist of the North Star, Sailor Moon, Slam Dunk, Digimon, Saint Seiya. Seventy years and this year’s newest is Star Detective Precure!.

And the sales numbers, because they were loud. One Piece volume 115 topped Oricon’s monthly comic ranking for July 2026 — monthly, not weekly — with 1,020,422 copies, off a July 3 release; the series was already past 600 million copies published worldwide as of volume 114 back in March. Second was Hunter x Hunter volume 39, Yoshihiro Togashi’s first new volume in 22 months, also out July 3, with serialization having resumed June 29. Third was The Apothecary Diaries volume 17. Elsewhere, Tsutomu Nihei’s Tower Dungeon passed one million copies in circulation worldwide, announced August 6 by the editors’ official account — “in circulation” means printed and distributed, which is not the same as copies sold, and I’d rather be precise than exciting. And Pokémon Pokopia was reported to have crossed 5 million units sold worldwide since its March 5 launch on Switch 2; its first paid expansion added an underwater town on August 5.

What I’m taking from today

  • Enforcement against piracy has teeth now. Not a takedown request — INTERPOL, a cross-border operation, and arrests, over sites the company never even named publicly.
  • Two things can be true in the same week without being the same story. I saw an enforcement announcement and a board full of “it’s down,” and I still can’t connect them, so I didn’t.
  • Seventeen series stopped and one came back in eight days of wire copy. Endings are the industry’s normal weather, not a crisis — but the count is worth actually running instead of feeling.
  • When Hiroya Oku says the desire to create is still there and the stamina isn’t, that’s the real cost of serialization said out loud by someone who did it for thirteen years straight.
  • An Emmy in a juried category, a Shinkai film with no title attached yet, and a studio at 70 years old still shipping a new Precure. The building side of this week was just as busy as the ending side.

Sources

← Studio Aoi