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While the My Dress-Up Darling manga took its sweet time giving romance fans the payoff they’ve been waiting for (and even more time giving us season two of the anime), the creator is already looking to expand the world they’ve created. Square Enix’s Young Gangan, which publishes the original series, is bringing us a spin-off manga of My Dress-Up Darling. The best news: the first chapter is due out in December 2024 in Japan.

The announcement came in the recent issue of Young Gangan, with three other manga being released in the same upcoming issue. Details are still a little bit scarce at the moment, but we do know that Shinichi Fukuda, the original creator of My Dress-Up Darling, will be involved. This time, though, she won’t be alone. Choboraunyopomi, known as the creator of the Ai-Mai-Mi series, will be joining her for the new series titled Chu with a Dress-Up Doll. (Chu is an onomatopoeia of a kissing noise in Japanese).

We don’t yet know which of the My Dress-Up Darling characters will be making an appearance in the new spin-off manga. The only plot detail that has been released is the short description of “a school life full of cuteness and chaos begins!” Since My Dress-Up Darling is part of any official digital distribution service, we aren't sure when (or if) the spin-off manga will come out overseas, but we have to have hope.

That isn’t exactly much to go on, but the fact that the original creator of My Dress-Up Darling is involved in the spin-off series is good to see. While we haven’t always loved the pacing of the series, at least we know it will have a good mix of humor and romance. It hasn’t been confirmed how Shinichi Fukuda and Choboraunyopomi will work together – if one will be the artist and the other the writer or if they will share duties – so there may be a visual change when the My Dress-Up Darling spin-off manga comes out in December 2024. 

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

• Why the finales of My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and One Piece feel like the end of an era in manga
• Why is One Piece more popular now that the anime is 25 years old? We asked around and found out
• Dan Da Dan is weird, profoundly inappropriate, and the perfect anime this season
• Why One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy is the perfect anime hero for the dark times ahead
• 40 years after its debut, Dragon Ball is a pop culture force like few others
• Dan Da Dan's most emotionally devastating sequence proves that sometimes words aren't necessary
• Gnosia, the "Among Us meets Everything Everywhere All at Once" visual novel is getting an anime adaptation that needs to be as weird as possible
• Assassination Classroom is a Shonen anime well worth revisiting, ten years on
• Sony is making big moves to own the anime industry by buying Kadokawa, publisher of Oshi no Ko, Sword Art Online, and Konosuba