Summary

• D.Gray-man was a popular anime that abruptly ended.
• The anime's cancellation was likely due to its bad pacing and the need for excessive filler episodes, which contradicted major events in the manga.
• Despite its troubled anime adaptation, the D.Gray-man manga continues to be successful, leaving many fans hoping for an anime reboot.

Much like Katsura Hoshino's manga on which it is based, the D.Gray-man anime was extremely popular when it started airing in 2006. As was the case with Naruto, One Piece and other shonen series of the early 2000s, D.Gray-man had length on its side, and surpassed 100 episodes. Despite its long-running tenure, the series abruptly ended even as the manga continued.

Although it's still fondly remembered by its remaining fans, D.Gray-man's sudden disappearance and its poorly-received revival caused interest in it to plummet. This wasn't helped by the separate issues plaguing the anime's and manga's production. Even today, D.Gray-man fans still wonder how the once-popular franchise fell off of the radar bit by bit, and was seemingly erased from history.

Updated on October 11, 2023 by Angelo Delos Trinos: The sad reality about D.Gray-man is that, these days, few if any anime fans even remember it. Those who know it are old enough to remember when D.Gray-man was new and promising, while younger anime fans can be forgiven for not even knowing what D.Gray-man is. This article was updated to acknowledge some of D.Gray-man's most recent developments.

What Was D.Gray-man About?

Like many popular fantasy anime of its time, D.Gray-man had a decidedly religious undertone, although its use of Judeo-Christian theology was incredibly loose. D.Gray-man was about a group of exorcists called The Black Order, who used an array of mystical weapons powered by "Innocence" to defend the world against the Noah Family. The clan comprised corrupted reincarnations of the Biblical Noah and his followers. Led by The Earl of Millennium, they waged war against God and his creations. The Noah Family used Dark Matter to combat the Black Order's Innocence, as well as a means to summon and control demons.

The protagonist in this 19th century-era anime was Allen Walker: a teenage recruit of the Black Order who had trouble controlling his own mysterious dark powers. The original anime adapted around 210 chapters of the manga, beginning initially with an episodic, monster-of-the-week format. Hoshino's visually-striking Gothic art style, interesting characters, and elaborately detailed action sequences earned critical praise. This was reflected in the manga's impressive sales figures. As of 2023, D.Gray-man sold at least 25 million copies worldwide. Hoshino's work even made it to the New York Times Bestsellers list. Even after years of relative silence and inactivity, D.Gray-man still consistently scored a respectable place on nostalgic popularity polls in Japan.

Is D.Gray-man Over?

In brief, the D.Gray-man anime is over, but the manga isn't. D.Gray-man's first series lasted 103 episodes that were spread across three "stages," or four seasons. After the conclusion of the fourth season, the anime simply stopped. It did have an ending of sorts, but it left the Black Order's future uncertain. However, this wasn't meant to be the series finale. In fact, the fourth season ended with Allen reigniting his determination to defeat the still-alive Earl of the Millennium. D.Gray-man's abrupt cancelation left fans scratching their heads, especially since the manga had tons of chapters left to adapt.

The best fans can do now is speculate the reasons behind D.Gray-man's first unceremonious end. The hypothesis most fans agreed on was that the anime was canceled because of its bad pacing. The anime already had to create excessive amounts of filler storylines to give Hoshino more time to make chapters for TMS Entertainment to adapt. While this may sound counterproductive today, it was a common practice among long-running anime adaptation in the 2000s. Unfortunately, some of D.Gray-man's fillers actually contradicted major events and elements in the manga. By the anime's halfway point, no amount of seasonal breaks and filler arcs could undo these irrevocable changes.

Hoshino was also sadly forced to put her manga on hiatus numerous times for health-related reasons. Once she did this after contracting the Norovirus, and another time was due to a neck injury. Her poor health kept new chapters from being published regularly, and slowed the manga's releases to a crawl. Even when D.Gray-man did return to normal publication, it shifted serialization from the Big Three's publisher Weekly Shonen Jump to the quarterly Jump Square Crown, where it is still currently being published.

D.Gray-man Had a Brief Comeback in D.Gray-man Hallow

Roughly eight years after its first cancelation, D.Gray-man returned in the 2016 sequel, D.Gray-man Hallow. Initially suspected to be a reboot, D.Gray-Man Hallow instead picked up where the original anime ended, then continued with a fairly faithful adaptation of the manga. Unfortunately, D.Gray-man Hallow had the opposite problem that the first anime ran into.

Whereas the first D.Gray-Man ran out of material adapt, D.Gray-man Hallow rushed and compressed too many of the manga's chapters into too few episodes. It's been estimated that each of D.Gray-man 13 episodes unwisely crammed almost 10 chapters at once. This led to an anime with a horribly rushed pace, and a very unsatisfying story. Hoshino, who was initially hesitant in creating the sequel, was unsurprisingly critical of it. Hoshino all but disowning D.Gray-man Hallow, combined with its disappointing ratings and reviews, possibly contributed to its DVD releases being abruptly canceled for "various reasons."

In spite of this, the D.Gray-man manga continued to go strong. It even reached a milestone in 2021. The series came to a "main story point" in the Summer 2021 edition of Jump SQ Rise. Many were and still are unsure of what this meant for the series, which had sporadic releases due to the aforementioned issues due to Hoshino's health. Some suspected that it meant the series was ending soon, while others believed it meant that a major arc was coming to a close just in time for a new one to begin. D.Gray-man dropped its 248th chapter in August 2023, and Hoshino attended some fan events in the same year.

What's Next For D.Gray-man?

Even in today's nostalgia-driven anime landscape and even in light of massively successful revivals like Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, it's highly unlikely that D.Gray-man would ever continue. Besides the lack of popular demand, the production of D.Gray-man was too grueling for everyone involved. Hoshino has shown no interest in returning to anime, and is content to work on her manga on a more relaxed schedule. Meanwhile, TMS Entertainment moved on to better-received adaptions like Dr. Stone and Rent-a-Girlfriend.Neither party has a strong incentive to return to the D.Gray-man anime.

Perhaps there's no better time than now to simply reboot D.Gray-man from scratch. This way, it could be more faithful to the manga. It wouldn't also have to rely too much on filler, and it could even air episodes on a looser schedule; similar to what Shaman King's 2021 reboot did. Whether this will happen for D.Gray-man remains to be seen, as the franchise has, in many ways, fallen out of the consciousness of mainstream anime fandom.