Black Butler

Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji) is a gothic mystery anime set in Victorian England, adapted from Yana Toboso's manga, which has run in Square Enix's Monthly GFantasy since 2006. Its engine is a contract: Ciel Phantomhive, a 12-year-old earl who heads the Funtom toy company in public, has traded his soul to a demon for revenge, and the demon now serves him as Sebastian Michaelis, a butler who cooks, fences, teaches and kills with the same unbothered courtesy. Ciel also works as the Queen's watchdog, quietly cleaning up the crimes the Crown cannot be seen to touch.

What keeps it distinctive is the power balance. The child gives every order, yet the servant is the one who will collect at the end, so each act of loyalty reads as both devotion and appetite. The cases borrow from real Victorian history, among them a Jack the Ripper case, and the household's hopeless staff (a gardener, a maid and a cook who wreck everything they touch) keep the grimmer chapters from becoming relentless. The supporting cast is half the fun, especially the flamboyant Grell Sutcliff and the cackling mortician known only as the Undertaker, who sells information for a good laugh.

The anime's history is the main thing a newcomer needs explained. A-1 Pictures' first series (24 episodes, 2008-2009) leaves the manga partway through and invents its own ending, and Black Butler II (12 episodes, 2010) continues that anime-only path. Book of Circus (10 episodes, 2014) then restarts from the manga and ignores both, followed by the two-part Book of Murder OVA (2014) and the film Book of the Atlantic (2017). After a seven-year gap, CloverWorks and director Kenjiro Okada picked the story up with Public School Arc (11 episodes, 2024) and Emerald Witch Arc (13 episodes, 2025). No follow-up to Emerald Witch Arc had been officially announced as of October 2026, and the manga still has arcs the anime has not reached.

Our advice for a manga-faithful run is to watch the first season's opening cases for the setup, then jump to Book of Circus and stay in release order from there. Black Butler suits viewers who like period mysteries, dark comedy and a lead who is not a good person, and Book of Circus is its bleakest, best stretch.