The Promised Neverland is a Japanese manga series written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu. It has been serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump since August 1, 2016 with the individual chapters collected and published by Shueisha into eight tankōbon volumes as of January 2018. The story follows a group of orphaned children in their escape plan from a farm. Viz Media licensed the manga in North America and serialized The Promised Neverland in their digital Weekly Shonen Jump magazine.
Set in year 2045, Emma is an 11-year-old orphan living in Grace Field House, a small orphanage housing her and her 37 siblings. Life had never been better; with food that tasted gourmet, plush beds, snow-white uniforms, the love of their “Mom” and caretaker Isabella, and the litany of daily exams that Emma always aced with her two best friends Ray and Norman. The orphans are basically allowed to do whatever they want, except to venture out of the compounds or the gate that connects the house to the outside world.
On a fateful night, another orphan named Conny is sent away to be adopted, but Emma and Norman follow her after noticing that she had left her stuffed rabbit toy Bernie back at the house. Sneaking out, they find Conny dead and the truth of the existence of this supposed orphanage to be a farm where human children are raised as food for demonic creatures. Worst still, Isabella is in allegiance with the demons, ripping away at everything the two ever thought they knew. Determined to break out of Grace Field House, Norman and Emma partner up with Ray to peel away at the façade of the farm and find a way to escape with all their other siblings.
Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu launched The Promised Neverland in issue 34 of Shueisha’s shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump on August 1, 2016. It is Shirai and Demizu second collaboration; their first series was Popy no Negai. On July 25, 2016, Viz Media announced that they would digitally publish the first three chapters of the series on Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. Thereafter, they will publish the manga’s new chapters simultaneously with the Japanese release. The first printed volume in North America was released on December 5, 2017.
The manga was nominated for the 10th Manga Taishō awards in January 2017, and gets 43 points from the “Executive Committee” of Manga Taishō awards and it was also nominated for the 11th edition of the Manga Taishō awards in 2018 and it received 26 points in total. As of August 2017, the manga had 1.5 million in print. By October 2017, the number had increased to 2.1 million. As of April 4, 2018, the first 8 volumes had 4.2 million copies in print. Anime News Network’s Rebecca Silverman enjoyed the first manga volume and gave it a A-, saying, “Tense pacing, interesting literary connections, art and story work well together, strong plot and foreshadowing.” In January 2018, the manga won the 63rd Shogakukan Manga Award in the Shōnen category.
As of May 28, 2018, the manga had 5 million copies in print worldwide.
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