Thank you for buying Gintama Volume 38. This is pretty late from me, but the Gintama anime is restarting in April. [NOTE: this was published in 2011, so he’s referring to season 5 of the anime that started that year. -ed.] This is also in large part thanks to everyone’s support. Anyhow, you may think that ever since the anime ended it was already decided it was gonna re-start from the production side, but it actually wasn’t. It seems that everyone certainly was in the mood of doing their best to try to get it to restart. Seeing what the consensus was, I said things like “With everyone’s help, we’ll get it restarted!” and stuff but me and my editor just had the instrumental remarks of it being a done deal. Some supervisor had “it’s finished business~” or maybe “it’s useless at this point~” stuck onto the front of his name. Well, we kept moving forward, and I said stuff like “it’ll be okay without you“ and “what’s important is the Jump brand~” and such. But both of us neither truly knew if we’d be a “source of revenue~” for each other. There wasn’t a ton of stock built up in the original manga yet so you could hear a lot of anxious voices saying things like “is this gonna be okay” and “isn’t it just gonna stop again really soon right after it starts?” but it’s all right. The heads would eliminate that kind of crappy anime before the stock would run out. Of course, I dunno when the original manga is gonna get eliminated so I can’t make any promises to quell those fears forever. But I can promise this. No matter when they’re eliminated, the manga and anime will continue like they always have, pitching without regrets. And if the time comes where we go down in a blaze of dirty fireworks, please say this, “It’s the anime’s fault. The manga was going great, so please restart it okay”.

–Gintama Vol. 38