Popverse's top stories

• Jeremy Renner and his Marvel co-stars laughed at Thor’s foam hammer when they made the first Avengers film
• Simon Kinberg on writing X-Men movies, producing Glenn Powell's The Running Man remake, and co-creating Star Wars Rebels [Popversations]
• Which Dragon Ball Z characters are the most painful to voice, according to the voice cast themselves

While most anime is an adaptation of an existing manga property, there is a rare title that comes around that is completely original. Aniplex unveiled one such title earlier in the week when they showed off the trailer for Virgin Punk. We’ve only had our first look at the futuristic and violent story and it has already become one of our most anticipated anime of 2025.

The first trailer for the upcoming anime shows a young woman emerging from what looks like a coma and stumbling into a futuristic world. There is plenty of action mixed in, though plot details are understandably scarce at the moment. Who this woman is, why she is stumbling out of a hospital room, and how she's able to break a man's arm so brutally are probably going to be a key part of the story.

What is clear is the beautiful animation from studio SHAFT (the Monogatari series and March Comes In Like a Lion), who have created a world that feels reminiscent of Cowboy Bebop in a more cyberpunk setting, which is the greatest sequence of words to ever be in the same sentence. There is a sense of style in every scene of the trailer and the promise of a mystery to unfold about the main character’s past and strange power. What more do you need?

Well, a release date would probably help, but we’re going to have to wait a while for that. So far, all that Aniplex and SHAFT have confirmed is that Virgin Punk is coming in the summer of 2025, so we’ll have to wait nearly a whole year to find out what is happening in this trailer. Still, there is enough cool stuff in this first trailer to get our attention. 

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... 

• Aggretsuko vs Chainsaw Man: Two Wildly different anine with the same anti-capitalist message
• The Summer Anime season return of Kaiju No. 8, Sakamoto Days, & Dan Da Dan are forcing me to break my vow of watching less anime
• From Tomo-Chan to Oshi No Ko: How some of your favorite manga creators got their start in hentai
• Piracy is baked into anime's past, but, like Crunchyroll, we should move on from it
• Flying whales, mechs, and Miyazaki vibes: Inside Netflix's Leviathan anime with the people who made it
• How AI translations of manga continues the 'enshitification' of the medium, and why Japanese publishers are "less precious" about it
• I never wanted a Cyberpunk Edgerunners sequel, but God help me I'm going to watch it
• The Summer Hikaru Died delivers its cosmic horror at an agonizingly slow pace
• The one thing that Dan Da Dan does better than Demon Slayer ever did
• Studio Ghibli movies have never been as cozy as you think they are and that's what makes them magic