On October 3, 2017, a kid with no magic screamed at the top of his lungs and a lot of us turned the volume down. On October 3, 2026, exactly nine years later and five and a half years after the anime simply stopped, Asta came back. Black Clover Season 2 premiered on Crunchyroll this past Saturday, and the fact that it exists at all is a better story than any single episode. It is a story about how one studio used to make anime, why that stopped working, and what the fix looks like. Here is the timeline.
2017 to 2021: 170 episodes, almost without stopping
The first run of Black Clover was built the old Studio Pierrot way. Pierrot is the studio that made Naruto and Bleach for the better part of two decades, and its whole model was volume: a new episode every single week, every week of the year, for as long as the manga held out. Black Clover got the same treatment. It started on October 3, 2017 and ran to 170 episodes with basically one interruption, a COVID pause in spring 2020 that lasted from late April until July 7.
That model had an obvious weakness that every Naruto fan already knows. When the anime moves weekly and the manga moves weekly, the anime catches the manga. Pierrot handled that in the Naruto days with filler, which is how we got roughly ninety filler episodes of Shippuden. With Black Clover it made a different call. On March 30, 2021, episode 170 aired, the Magic Knights were literally mid-raid on the Spade Kingdom, and the show ended. Not a cliffhanger finale. Just a stop, with a message that the story would continue in a movie.
That is why the ending stung. Black Clover started as a loud, by-the-numbers Jump show and quietly became one of the best-animated weekly series of its era. It earned its fanbase the hard way and then went dark.
2021 to 2023: the gap, and the movie that filled it
The gap had two causes and only one of them was the anime. The manga itself slowed down. Yuki Tabata's Black Clover moved from Weekly Shonen Jump to the quarterly Jump GIGA in 2023, which meant chapters arrived a few times a year instead of every week. You cannot run a weekly anime in front of a quarterly manga, so even if Pierrot had wanted to keep going, there was nothing to adapt.
The one thing fans got in the meantime was Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King, which was supposed to land on March 31, 2023, got pushed, and finally released on June 16, 2023 in Japanese theaters and on Netflix worldwide the same day. It is an original story (Conrad Leto and the resurrected Wizard Kings), it does not touch the Spade Kingdom cliffhanger, and it was directed by Ayataka Tanemura. Remember that name.
2022 to 2024: Pierrot stops making anime the old way
This is the part most recap articles skip, and it is the real reason Season 2 exists. While Black Clover sat on the shelf, Pierrot changed its production model, and it used Bleach to do it.
Bleach ended in 2012. Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War came back on October 11, 2022, after a ten-year gap, and instead of running weekly until it died, it ran in cours: ten to thirteen episodes, then a break. Part 1 aired October to December 2022. Part 2, The Separation, ran July to September 2023. Part 3, The Conflict, ran October to December 2024. Part 4, The Calamity, started July 25, 2026 and wrapped in mid-September. That is four short seasons across four years instead of 200 episodes, and anyone who has seen the Ichigo versus Quilge fight in Part 1 knows what the extra time bought.
Then, on May 5, 2024, Pierrot announced Pierrot Films, a new branch built explicitly around the MAPPA-style idea of fewer, bigger projects. Producer Yoshihiko Tominaga said the goal was top-quality animation and stories in a short period of time, and Parts 3 and 4 of Bleach are credited to Pierrot Films rather than the main studio. The weekly-forever model was formally over.
Put those together and the Black Clover gap looks less like neglect and more like a studio waiting until it could do the Spade Kingdom raid, the arc with the Dark Triad, the Devils, and every major character fighting at once, properly.
2025 to 2026: the comeback, step by step
Season 2 was announced at Anime Expo on July 5, 2025, with a teaser and a confirmed director: Ayataka Tanemura, the same director who handled the movie and late Season 1 episodes, replacing Tatsuya Yoshihara. Keiichiro Ochi returned for series composition, Itsuko Takeda for character design, and Minako Seki for music. The first full trailer dropped at Jump Festa in December 2025. The October 3 date was confirmed at Anime Expo in July 2026. A pre-premiere visual landed on September 28, and the creditless opening went up the day of the premiere. The opening is "Kienai Riyuu" by WANIMA, an on-brand pick for a show whose thesis is shouting through the pain.
The season picks up right where episode 170 stopped, in the moments before the Spade Kingdom raid kicks off. If it has been five years since you watched, the last dozen episodes of the original run are the ones to rewatch; you do not need to go back further than the Heart Kingdom training.
And it is not stopping with the premiere. New York Comic Con runs October 8 to 11, and Crunchyroll is doing a Black Clover Season 2 screening with live dubbing on the Empire Stage on Saturday, October 10 at 12:45 PM. If you are in New York, that is the panel to be at. (The manga, for what it is worth, has also wrapped this year, so for the first time the anime has a finish line to aim at.)
What is on our shelf (and what is not)
We will be honest: our Black Clover collection is thin right now. Five years without a show will do that to a merch line. What we do have in stock is a pair of Funko POPs, Noelle #1100 and Yuno #1101, both $11.99, made for the first run and waiting on our wall for exactly this week. Expect new figures now that the show is back; the anime returns first, then Banpresto and Good Smile follow six to twelve months later.
The Pierrot shelf, where we are actually deep
If the Black Clover comeback has you nostalgic for the studio's whole catalogue, that is where our stock is. The Naruto Shippuden shelf is the deepest in the store, over 200 items between it and the original Naruto collection. Our picks: the Nendoroid Kakashi Anbu Black Ops at $57.95 and its partner Nendoroid Itachi Anbu Black Ops at $64.99 are the two we would buy first, because the Anbu masks are the best accessories Good Smile has ever done for this series. The Vibration Stars Rock Lee is $26.99 and has the single best pose of any Naruto prize figure. The Chibi Masters Jiraiya is $15 and is the one we recommend to people who want one Naruto figure on a desk. And if you want the flagship, the G.E.M. Hashirama is $199.99, we have three, and MegaHouse does not reprint G.E.M. often.
Nendoroid Kakashi (Anbu) · $57.95
Nendoroid Itachi (Anbu) · $64.99
Vibration Stars Rock Lee · $26.99
G.E.M. Hashirama · $199.99
Pierrot also made Tokyo Ghoul, and the Tokyo Ghoul collection has the Kaneki Nendoroid plush pillow at $24.99 (we have seven left) and the Touka Nendoroid Pin at $14.99. And since this is comeback week more broadly, Tokyo Revengers Season 4 premiered on October 2 with a JO1 opening, and the Tokyo Revengers shelf has the Banpresto Mikey at $26.99 and the POP UP PARADE Chifuyu at $45.99, which is the best-value Tokyo Revengers figure we carry. For the Boruto crowd, the Boruto collection has the Hokage Naruto AAA exclusive POP at $19.99.
Kaneki Nendoroid Plush · $24.99
Touka Nendoroid Pin · $14.99
Banpresto Mikey · $26.99
POP UP PARADE Chifuyu · $45.99
Why this matters beyond Black Clover
Our take: the weekly-forever shonen is dead, and Black Clover's gap is the clearest proof. What replaced it is slower and better: Bleach in four cours, Black Clover back when the manga could support it, directed by the person who already made the movie look good. The waiting is real. But we would rather wait five years for the Spade Kingdom raid done right than get it on time with the budget of a 2019 filler episode. If you dropped off in 2021, this is the week to come back. Rewatch the last stretch, watch the new opening twice, and if you are at NYCC, the Empire Stage on Saturday is the place to be.
Everything above ships flat $5 anywhere in the US, and the anime best-sellers collection and $10 to $20 shelf are the easy places to start if you want something small to celebrate the comeback.