There's a specific feeling certain manga create. You finish a chapter and reach for the next volume before you've consciously decided to keep reading. You look up, hours have passed, your tea has gone cold, and you have no memory of the time disappearing.
These four are designed for that exact feeling. One is 845+ chapters of escalating war strategy that has run for two decades without losing a step. One is 83 chapters of pure controlled detonation by the same mind that made Chainsaw Man. One is 383 chapters of escalating absurdity that gets weirder and more compelling every arc. And one is 167 chapters of beautifully drawn chaos that doesn't resemble anything else in the medium.
All four are available digitally. ComicFlow is built for reading long manga series — it tracks your progress across hundreds of volumes, supports right-to-left manga reading, and reads CBR, CBZ, RAR, ZIP, and PDF files completely offline.
Quick Reference
| # | Series | Chapters | Genre | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kingdom | 845+ | Historical / war / strategy | Ongoing |
| 2 | Fire Punch | 83 | Dark fantasy / drama | Completed |
| 3 | Gantz | 383 | Sci-fi / horror / action | Completed |
| 4 | Dorohedoro | 167 | Dark fantasy / comedy | Completed |
Three are completed. Kingdom is the one ongoing pick — you can binge the existing 845 chapters and then keep up with new volumes as they release.
1. Kingdom
By: Yasuhisa Hara | Chapters: 845+ (ongoing since 2006) | Genre: Historical / war / strategy
Set in 3rd century BCE China during the Warring States period, Kingdom follows Xin (Shin), a war orphan and slave who dreams of becoming the greatest general under heaven. He befriends a young king with the same ambition for unification. The series chronicles their parallel rises — Xin from foot soldier to legendary commander, the king from political pawn to the man who will eventually become China's first emperor.
This is the most consistent long-running manga of the last twenty years. 845+ chapters of ongoing serialization and the strategy never gets stale, the character roster never gets confused, and every arc raises the stakes higher than the last. Hara studies real military history, and the battle tactics — flanking, feints, troop morale, terrain advantages — are drawn with a level of detail that makes you feel like you're reading military theory dressed up as an action manga. If you've ever loved Game of Thrones, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or any long-form epic about people climbing impossible ranks, Kingdom delivers that feeling for hundreds of hours.
Note: a Hollywood-scale live-action film series exists in Japan and is excellent. Read the manga first.
2. Fire Punch
By: Tatsuki Fujimoto | Chapters: 83 (completed) | Genre: Dark fantasy / post-apocalyptic / drama
In a frozen, cannibalistic dystopia, a teenager with regenerative powers watches his sister get burned alive. He is then set on fire by a man whose flames cannot be extinguished — and his regeneration keeps him alive while he burns, forever, walking across the wasteland on a singular vendetta. That premise is what the back cover sells you. The actual story is something else entirely.
Fire Punch is Tatsuki Fujimoto's first major work, written before Chainsaw Man, and it might be more unhinged than anything else he's done. 83 chapters is short for a manga but the density is staggering — every chapter pivots somewhere unexpected. Fujimoto has a gift for taking the audience's emotional investment and lighting it on fire (literally). The art has a rawness his later work has polished out, and the themes about cinema, performance, and meaning hit harder than they have any right to. Trust nothing the early chapters set up.
3. Gantz
By: Hiroya Oku | Chapters: 383 (completed) | Genre: Sci-fi / horror / action / mystery
A high school student dies pushing a drunk man off subway tracks. He wakes up in a Tokyo apartment with a black sphere named "Gantz" and a handful of other recently-dead strangers. Gantz hands them weapons and sends them to hunt aliens hiding in the city. The aliens are weirder than anything you're picturing. The rules of the game keep changing. The body count is enormous.
Gantz starts strange and just keeps escalating for 383 chapters. Hiroya Oku's art is technically stunning — he was an early adopter of 3D modeling for manga and the action sequences feel like they're from a different medium. The series goes places — alien invasions, religious horror, philosophical questions about consciousness, full-scale destruction of major cities — that no other manga has the nerve to attempt. The less you know going in, the better. A live-action film duology and a 2016 CGI movie exist; both are decent, but neither comes close to the manga's full sweep.
4. Dorohedoro
By: Q Hayashida | Chapters: 167 (completed) | Genre: Dark fantasy / action / comedy
A man with a reptile head named Caiman lives in a slum called the Hole, where sorcerers from another dimension visit to practice transformations on humans. He has no memory of who he was, but he can fit a sorcerer's head inside his mouth, and the man inside his throat tells him the sorcerer who transformed him is the one who'll know his real name. Also there's a gyoza restaurant. And a mailman with a heart-shaped face. And a psychotic baseball-loving warlord. And it all somehow connects.
Dorohedoro is the most original manga on this list, full stop. Q Hayashida built a world that doesn't resemble anything else in the medium — punk-grimy, weirdly tender, hilariously violent, and gorgeously hand-drawn. The art is dense black-and-white linework where every page rewards a second look. The story takes 167 chapters to fully bloom, and by the time it does, the cast of dozens has become some of the most beloved characters in seinen manga. The 2020 anime adaptation is excellent but only covers about a third of the story. If you want a manga that feels completely unlike anything you've read before, this is the one.
How to Read Long Manga Without Losing Track
The hardest part of reading a long series isn't time — it's organization. You're 47 chapters into Kingdom, you put it down for a week, and now you can't remember which volume you're on or which character you were supposed to remember.
ComicFlow is built specifically for this. The app:
- Tracks your reading progress at the page level across every series in your library, so you always pick up exactly where you left off
- Manages collections, ratings, and tags for organizing 100+ volume series alongside short completed reads
- Reads every common format (CBR, CBZ, RAR, ZIP, PDF) without conversion
- Works completely offline so you can read a long manga on a plane, a subway, or a beach with no signal
- One-time purchase — no subscription, no ads, no tracking
For a step-by-step setup guide, see our walkthrough on how to build a manga library on iPhone.
Related Articles
- Best Manga for Beginners: 15 Series to Start With — Shorter, gentler entry points if 845 chapters feels like a lot
- 4 Manga to Binge in a Weekend — Completed seinen series you can finish in a few days
- How to Build a Manga Library on iPhone (2026) — The full setup for managing long series digitally
- How to Read Manga on iPhone: RTL Reading Setup — Right-to-left reading mode for authentic manga
- How to Organize a Digital Comic Collection — File naming, folder structure, and library tagging for big collections
