Saint Seiya: Tenkai-hen Begins: Masami Kurumada Takes the Legendary Series to the Heavens
The moment Saint Seiya (Knights of the Zodiac) fans have been waiting for has finally arrived! The series creator, legendary mangaka Masami Kurumada, has returned with his long-awaited new manga, Saint Seiya: Tenkai-hen (Heaven Chapter). Debuting today, May 14th, in the 24th issue of Weekly Shonen Champion magazine, the series is set to take the epic struggle of Pegasus Seiya and his friends against the gods to the next level.
This new series serves as a direct sequel to Saint Seiya: Next Dimension - The Myth of Hades, which ran intermittently for 18 years from 2006 until July 2024. As you may recall, Next Dimension concluded with its 118th chapter, ending on a dramatic note where Athena (Saori Kido) chose to become human. Tenkai-hen will focus on the knights whose memories were erased following this finale and the new moves of the Olympian gods. The short anthology chapters (Haikyo no Hana, Shimei, and Ketsui) released under the title Saint Seiya Then prior to the series' launch served as a bridge for this new grand arc.
The name Tenkai-hen is not unfamiliar to die-hard fans of the series. The 2004 film Saint Seiya: Tenkai-hen Josō ~Overture~ aimed to launch this story, but the project was left incomplete because Masami Kurumada was not satisfied with the direction of the screenplay. At that time, Kurumada decided to write Next Dimension to reflect his own vision. Now, 20 years later, the master writer has the opportunity to put the "Heaven Chapter" on paper entirely on his own terms and exactly as he imagined it.
