Shun Saeki, the artist behind Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma, is going freelance. In a post on X on Nov. 1, Saeki announced that the exclusive contract with Shueisha, which Saeki had held for many years, has come to an end.
“I have now concluded (terminated) the exclusive contract with Shueisha that I had maintained for many years,” Saeki wrote, thanking everyone who had helped along the way. Saeki is now accepting new jobs, including drawing manga, illustration and character design, but is not taking on long-term projects for now.
Saeki did not explain why the contract ended or hint at what comes next. Anime News Network first reported the announcement in English.
Exclusive deals are common for artists who come up through Shueisha’s magazines. They tie a creator to one publisher and its editors, often for years, in exchange for steady support and placement in titles like Weekly Shonen Jump. Leaving one does not mean a creator is done with that publisher, but it does let them take work elsewhere.
Saeki is best known for Food Wars!, the cooking battle manga drawn from writer Yūto Tsukuda’s scripts. The series ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2012 until August 2019, when it wrapped with a three-chapter epilogue, and professional chef Yuki Morisaki was credited for culinary help. It spawned a five-season anime and became one of Jump’s bigger international hits. Viz Media released the manga in English chapter by chapter and in collected volumes, and Shueisha also ran it on MANGA Plus.
Tsukuda and Saeki teamed up again after Food Wars!, first on one-shots co-written with NisiOisin in 2019 and 2020, and then on Tenmaku Cinema, a series about young filmmakers that launched in Weekly Shonen Jump in April 2023 and ended that September, with a bonus chapter that November.
The manga business has been reshuffling partnerships lately, with Marvel ending its own Shueisha manga deal on Sept. 30 and partnering with Kadokawa on original Spider-Man manga. For Saeki, the next step is open, and fans of Saeki’s precise, expressive art will be watching to see where it shows up first.
