J.C. Staff Animates Teenage Mercenary Webtoon for 2027 Broadcast – News

Crunchyroll announced at New York Comic Con on Thursday that J.C. Staff is animating the previously announced adaptation of YC and Rakyeon’s original webtoon Teenage Mercenary (Nyūgaku Yōhei in Japanese) for broadcast next year.

Manabu Ono (Sword Art Online: Alicization) is directing and overseeing the series scripts, and Koji Haneda is designing the characters. Hiroyuki Sawano is composing the music. Hayate is producing the project.

WEBTOON started publishing the series in English in June 2021 and describes the story:

At the age of eight, Yu Ijin (Sōma Tatewaki in Japanese version) lost his parents in a plane crash and became stranded in a foreign land, forced to become a child mercenary in order to stay alive. He returns home ten years later to be reunited with his family in Korea, where food and shelter are plenty and everything seems peaceful. But Ijin will soon learn that life as a teenager is a whole other feat of survival. With only one year of high school left, Ijin must master new tactics to maneuver his way around the schoolhouse battleground. Can he survive a year of high school? Or rather, will the school be able to survive him?

The series launched in Korean on Naver Webtoon in November 2020. The series then launched on LINE Manga in Japan in April 2021, and has a cumulative domestic view count of over 730 million (as of May 2025). The series won first place in the “LINE Manga 2023 Annual Ranking,” and also the next year in the “LINE Manga 2024 Annual Ranking (serialized).”

The series is distributed in 10 languages and has over 2.84 billion views worldwide (as of September 2026).

Sources: Teenage Mercenary anime’s website, Comic Natalie, press release