The news just keeps getting better and better for fans of manga creative team Clamp’s beloved magical girl.

To give you an idea of how long the Cardcaptor Sakura anime and manga franchise went dormant for, your parents could have met after reading the last chapter and watching the last episode, then conceived and given birth to you, and today you’d be several years older than 10-year-old protagonist Sakura Kinomoto. With both the animated and comic versions of Sakura supposedly wrapping up in 2000, the series seemed to have settled down in a comfortable bed of nostalgia, to be fondly remembered like others that have run their course.

All of that suddenly changed when publisher Kodansha announced earlier this year that a new Cardcaptor Sakura manga was on the way, and that it wasn’t going to be a one-time deal, but a full-fledged sequel series. On June 3, Sakura made her triumphant return to the pages of monthly girls’ manga anthology Nakayoshi with the start of the story’s “Clear Card Arc,” in which the titular card capturer, plus her friends Tomoyo and Syaoran, are now junior high school students.

And if that wasn’t enough to make readers’ day, the issue also contains the formal announcement that “A new Cardcaptor Sakura anime project is underway.” More specific details are yet to be revealed, but given the current state of the anime industry, a TV series seems the most likely form for it to take. The direct-to-video anime sector has almost entirely dried up, and a theatrical feature would probably be seen by producers as overly ambitious for Sakura’s first animated outing in over a decade.

But while fans are going to have to wait a little while longer to find out if they’ll get to see a new Cardcaptor Sakura episode every week, at least they can be sure of a new manga chapter every month.

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Source: Comic Natalie via Jin, IT Media