Summer 2026 Manga Guide
Girls' Last Tour Collector's Edition
What's It About?

Civilization is dead, but not Chito and Yuuri. Time to hop aboard their beloved Kettenkrad motorbike and wander what's left of the world! Sharing a can of soup or scouting for spare parts might not be the experience they were hoping for, but all in all, life isn't too bad…The hit comfy/existential post-apocalypse manga is now being released in a deluxe omnibus edition!
Girls' Last Tour Collector's Edition has a story and art by Tsukumizu. English translation is done by Amanda Haley, and lettering by Abigail Blackman and Xian Michele Lee. Published by Yen Press (August 25, 2026). Rated T.
Is It Worth Reading?
Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

“Girls traveling in a post-apocalyptic cityscape” has become its own subgenre of science fiction, but for my money, Girls' Last Tour is the most striking. I love the way the vaguely blobby girls – drawn much less realistically than the backgrounds they travel through – juxtapose with their ruined world, and that the bleakness of their journey isn't overwhelming. That's not to suggest that this isn't a story with some serious grimness; it still takes place in a place where a cataclysmic disaster has decimated civilization and most of life on Earth. But that's not the point of Chii and Yuu's story. The point is exploration.
One of the more impressive elements of this omnibus, which contains the first three volumes of the series, is the careful, almost gentle way it doles out information about the world. It's volume three before we learn that the girls came from an actual village, letting us know that there are, in fact, pockets of civilization left, presumably outside the giant cities they travel through. Backgrounds consistently show the rusting, collapsing apparatus of war, implying that humans are the authors of their own destruction, but “a war” never really comes up in the text. In volumes two and three, we see evidence of humanity tampering with the natural world in the form of square potatoes grown aboveground on vines and a sad, singular fish swimming in a tank watched over by a guardian robot. The implication is just that humans couldn't save themselves from their most destructive tendencies.
The action of these volumes takes place entirely in a single, cavernous city. The girls enter on the lowest strata and are slowly making their way upward, supplying themselves with a mix of what their village sent with them and the remnants of civilization. They meet only one other person per volume – a mapmaker in volume one, a would-be pilot and aircraft mechanic in volume two, and the robot in volume three. This paucity of people speaks to the fact that humanity has declined, but also that this may only be the case for the cities, or at least that the cities are the epicenter of the destruction. Each new building or layer the girls discover shows a different element of the past, and while Yuu is more interested in play and eating, Chii really thinks about what she's seeing and what happened in the presumably distant past. Their differences highlight a spectrum of humanity, which is further shaped by the people they meet.
Although Girls' Last Tour is a bit bleak, it's not overwhelmingly so. It's like a modern-day version of early-twentieth-century adventure fiction, in which heroes explore the ruins of the past. Straddling the line between moe and science fiction, it's a fascinating journey into what may be our future unless we learn to prevent it.
Kevin Cormack
Rating:

I'm very glad that Girls' Last Tour is back in print, as some of Yen Press' original single volumes now run to insane prices on the secondhand market. At only six volumes, it's not a long series, and this first omnibus covers half. 2017's 12-episode anime adaptation is one of my favorite anime of all time, but it stopped short of animating volumes five and six, including the ending, so the manga remains the only way to experience the full story. I absolutely recommend reading the whole thing.
To classify it reductively, Girls' Last Tour is essentially “cute girls do cute things at the end of the world”. Chito and Yuuri are teenage girls, probably among the very last surviving humans, who travel the desolate, empty wastelands of a colossal, brutalist city, long after some catastrophe (probably war) killed everyone else. Their main concerns are scavenging for food and locating warmth and shelter. Although the artwork is simple and scratchy, artist Tsukumizu still manages to conjure an impressive sense of scale and lonely emptiness.
Most chapters are simple, self-contained vignettes in which the girls stumble upon something interesting, must navigate challenging terrain, or even ponder the meaning of life. It's not unusual for Chito to muse on the afterlife or the existence of gods. It's all a bit more profound than the average slice-of-life manga.
Occasionally, they bump into other characters (not always human) who struggle on with their own very narrow purposes. Almost invariably, their stories end with some kind of defeat, or at least a pyrrhic victory, that could invite nihilism or resignation. When the rest of the world has died and gone before you, what is the point of continuing when your own purpose is lost? Girls' Last Tour asks these uncomfortable questions, though it doesn't necessarily provide clean, didactic answers.
Chito and Yuuri have no specific agenda other than their own survival together, and this is enough to keep them going. Their friendly banter and silly arguments are amusing, but we're never in any doubt that their future is limited; they're traveling towards inevitable doom. Although such existentialism sounds off-putting, it's a really sweet and entertaining read, a hypnotic travelogue through a decaying, crumbling world. I think it's one of those manga that everyone should read, if only to make us thankful for the world we still have.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of Anime News Network, its employees, owners, or sponsors.
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.
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