What’s Weekly Shonen Jump’s Next Big Manga? – This Week in Anime

senpai July 7, 2024

0 1 12 minutes read

What's Weekly Shonen Jump's Next Big Manga? - This Week in Anime

Some of Shonen Jump‘s biggest manga hits are approaching their end. Does the magazine have new heavy-hitters lined up to take up the mantle?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Most of these manga series are available to read digitally on Viz‘s Shonen Jump app.

Lucas

Hi Nick! Hope you’re doing well! People sure did have a lot to say about our last joint column covering this season’s slate of isekai. Plus, Chris and Steve’s exploration of queerbating in Sound! Euphonium was both illuminating and entertaining. I don’t know how we’re going to top ourselves this week without resorting to gross exaggerations and clickbait-style openings…

WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP IS DYING AND IF YOU’RE NOT SCARED YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!!!

Nick

Oh nooooooo. Another god damned exorcist battle series ended in under 30 chapters. What a tragedy. I’m sure another one won’t show up in five minutes to replace i—

📣 NEW SERIES ALERT! 📣

Kyokuto Necromance by Fusai Naba joins the Shonen Jump lineup on Sunday!

A young man’s life takes a shocking turn when he learns there are deadly spirits all around us! Read it FREE from the official source! https://t.co/43cx2Jcf2P pic.twitter.com/om0WYt9wKe

— Shonen Jump (@shonenjump) April 18, 2024

Oh good. Crisis averted. See everybody again in about five months.

Ah, Kyokuto Necromance, a series that asks the question, “Hey, what if we took the art of Chainsaw Man, the opening vibes of Jujutsu Kaisen, and the premise of…way too many shonen manga and mashed them together!?”

The answer is that it’d be super forgettable and have a name that I’ll misremember/mispronounce.

It’s still probably a better title than “Shadow Eliminators,” which always sounded like a bootleg video game cartridge you’d find in a pawn shop.

Before we get into any particular series, I want to address the idea at the core of this discussion: the idea that, with some of its biggest established series inching towards their endings, the lineup of Weekly Shonen Jump is in for a big shakeup. It’s a topic I’ve seen brought up several times through the years, and while I know you’re joking, I also know some people who think that Jump’s days are numbered.

Yeah, shifting from SEO mode to pundit/manga fan mode, you’re right. Shadow Eliminators wasn’t a tentpole series for Weekly Shonen Jump manga like One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and My Hero Academia. And two of those three feel like they will probably end within the next year.

While Weekly Shonen Jump is an institution in the manga industry, it will be weird to see it try to find its footing without some of the biggest current IP in anime and manga bolstering it anymore, especially since many of the new manga it has published lately are niche at best and derivative at worst.

I’ll be honest with you, Lucas. I’ve been in this game a long time. I have followed Jump for more than half my life, and I mean that literally. I semi-regularly update a big dumb infographic of all the series running in the magazine. So believe me when I say that I’ve been here before. I was there in 2020 when it was Demon Slayer and The Promised Neverland. I was there in 2016 when it was Bleach and Assassination Classroom. I have watched the manga version of empires rise, stagnate, fall, and vanish. If anything, I’d say that Jump is in a stronger position than ever when it’s about to wrap up some big tentpoles.

Oh my god, hearing an optimistic voice in this discourse is so refreshing! Why do you think Jump is in a strong position, with two of its most well-known releases winding down simultaneously? Also, as you’ve highlighted the cyclical nature of this discourse, do you think the Shonen Jump app’s fairly ubiquitous presence today has exacerbated these current conversations?

To your first question, it comes down to the titles they have waiting in the wings. Most folks understandably think of Jump as synonymous with battle series, but especially in the last few years, their lineup has started featuring not just more unconventional series but highly successful ones. Two of their most consistent sellers right now are a slow-burn romance series/sports drama and a series about minimalist storytelling from the 18th century.

You make a strong argument, and I think if we look at every series that’s run in the magazine over its history, sports and gag manga are more foundational to Jump than anything battle-focused.

Also, for what it’s worth, Chainsaw Man and, bizarrely, Robot X Laserbeam are the series that made me realize there was more to Jump than just people punching each other really hard.

There was quite a while where the typical lineup was battle series, gag series, 1-2 sports titles, and an obligatory fanservice thing. However, the last few years have seen the magazine’s editors branching out beyond what’s typically considered a Jump story, and the audience has responded emphatically. The series has since moved to a digital release to accommodate the artist’s health, but RuriDragon, a low-key slice-of-life series, had bigger first-volume sales than My Hero Academia did during its debut.

And for good reason! RuriDragon is such a sweet and wholesome take on the “this kid inherited powers from the parent they never knew” trope, and I’m so glad that Masaoki Shindō has recovered enough to release new chapters.

It’s great, and I am both very happy for its success and still quietly shocked. Because this is the last kind of series I would associate with the magazine that carried One Piece and Naruto. Yet, I think its popularity speaks to how much manga readership has evolved in the age of digital publication. It’s easier than ever to discover new stuff and branch out from the genres you’re used to!

Oh man, I’m sensing a future TWIA convo in the making, “If Shonen Jump is running a non-shonen series, what even is shonen anymore?” But we can save my rant for how unhelpful it is to define the genre by targeted age and gender demographics for a different chat.

Oh, I will gladly wear down everyone’s patience ranting about the goofy ways English-speaking fandom misuses those demographic labels. Give me the green light, Lynzee.

Editor’s Note: Go for it.

Anyway, my point is that the landscape of manga readership has changed a lot, and while the current bench for Jump certainly looks odd compared to past years, it’s got a lot of promise—both from a sales perspective and in terms of being cool manga that I like reading.

Come on, Lynzee! What is TWIA but a thinly veiled excuse for us to go down contentious rabbit holes???

Editor’s Note: You can’t just tell them that.

I agree with you, though I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Jump has always been more eclectic than I think people give it credit for. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a card game horror series that’s technically one of the most profitable IPs to appear in Jump. Also, Death Note is an accidental gay camp that I still can’t believe ran simultaneously with titles like Naruto and Prince of Tennis.

Sure, and to be clear, it’s not like any of the titles above are some avant-garde genre experiments. You can find other titles like them in tons of other magazines. I just think their presence indicates that Jump is expanding the kinds of stories it tells to allow it more room to grow even as its big titles call it a career. You don’t have to worry about finding the next MHA or JJK when you’re casting a wider net. However, that hasn’t stopped them from, well, trying to find the next MHA or JJK. I wasn’t joking about feeling like we get a new exorcist manga every six months.

That’s also what I think is making people feel dower about Jump’s future this time around than in prior rounds of this discourse. With more Jump manga officially simulpub’d than ever before, English-speaking audiences better understand how the sausage is made.

That is to say, through pretty consistent and aggressive cancellations.

I’ve done the numbers on this a few times, and on average, a new Jump series has, at best, about a 25% chance of surviving past a year. Generally, the odds are closer to 1 in 12. Steve and I even did a whole other column on that, and I’d agree that the visibility of simulpubs has introduced the concept of The Axe to a lot more people.

Those statistics sound about right to me, and the sad thing is, most of the time, those cuts seem fairly deserved. I know there are exceptions and that it’s crass to think of art in terms of “is this popular enough to deserve to exist,” but I don’t think anyone’s losing sleep over titles like Mama Yūyū, Ice-Head Gill, or Doron Dororon having more expedited runs.

If anything, this system of approval and routine cancellations makes me deeply curious about what the pitching and approval process over at Jump’s owner, Shueisha, is like.

Another factor is some jarring disparities between the collective taste among the English and Japanese readerships. Over here, we’re used to people gassing up the action titles or the serious sports series, and fandom at large rarely has any patience for comedy series. Here, you could reliably hear people talking about Undead Unluck as the GOATed new-gen, but in Japan, it’s consistently outsold by Witch Watch, a series where Kenta Shinohara talks at you about the proper way to care for your jeans.

Damn, button-fly jeans to boot! Kenta Shinohara is hardcore and has my respect!

Do you think there’s any chance that folks will start looking to other manga publications to get their battle fix now that Jump seems to be finding their most successful new series outside of that genre? I know other magazines are more inconsistent about officially translating releases than Jump, but it’s still easier than ever to read most major releases nowadays.

Possibly, it’s not like Jump has a monopoly on big hits. They have a large enough platform to push stuff harder—to the point where their digital-only publication, Shonen Jump+, has produced multiple huge titles in just a few years. SPY x FAMILY, Hell’s Paradise, this season’s Kaiju No. 8, and the highly anticipated Dandadan all hail from there.

So, I guess the actual answer for Jump was to start a second magazine to produce even more hits.

Yeah, it’s been true for a while now that the most interesting releases under the Jump banner are all on its sister publications. As far as Jump+ titles go, I’m also partial to MARRIAGE TOXIN. Not to mention that The JoJo Lands in Ultra Jump is making a strong opening argument for being the best entry in JJBA franchise.

Honestly, there’s probably a reason that Viz Media‘s “Shonen Jump” app/publishing line doesn’t distinguish which magazine their series run in: It doesn’t matter all that much anymore. Hell, a series being gone from the magazine doesn’t even stop it from selling if it has a long enough tail. Demon Slayer is set to keep printing money for at least another couple of seasons of anime, and that ended a whole presidential term ago.

Hmmm, would “The Manga That Got Us Through The Trump Years” be better as a TWIA column, or as a collab blog??? The ball’s in your court once again, Lynzee!

I’m going to pull seniority and veto that one unless I can invoice my alcohol intake to get through it.

Hey, if working as a freelancer is going to kick my ass come tax time as much as I think it will this year, I might have to categorize my alcohol purchases as a business expense!

But I see where you’re coming from. The distinctions between publications have never felt more superfluous now that genres/target demos have broken down. Though, in my limited purview, it does seem like new releases that are Frankensteins of ideas that worked better in other series tend to land in Weekly Shonen Jump.

That probably comes down to editorial oversight. While the playing field has expanded, the main magazine still carries a built-in readership and a lot of prestige. So, I imagine editors are more conservative about what they allow in. While there have been successes, other series that pushed the boundaries have failed hard and fast. Plus, I’ll be the first to tell you I haven’t been impressed with too many new series in the past year.

I will take the high road on this one rather than drag some series out of the ground only to shove them further into the muck. Have you liked any new Jump releases? Even if it got canned, I felt like Fabricant 100 had a novel enough premise I read all the way.

I was a big fan of Martial Master Asumi, partly because of its in-depth exploration of combat sports’ intricacies and partly because the creator is a man of culture.

But I wasn’t trying to crap on anything in particular. Rather, I wanted to emphasize that Jump’s model is a marathon, not a sprint. Sometimes, you get consecutive batches of stuff that seem like total fodder, and sometimes, you get multiple bangers across a single year. It’s a pattern consistent in the long run but can seem erratic or volatile in the short term.

Ah, yes, glasses. Very classy. (Internal monologue: abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs abs)

And sorry, I didn’t mean to sound accusatory there. I was debating if I wanted to bring up any of the many series that can be summarized with the passage, “A high school boy discovers he’s a demon/gets a demon familiar/is the specialist boy in all the land and has to do battle monsters that look like they’re from a horror manga,” but thought that in poor taste, haha.

It’s cool. I’m glad you’re here with me on this, actually, because I’m pretty sure you’re the only other person on staff who gets football metaphors.

Lynzee! The NFL Draft is coming up! Can we…no, not even for the sake of this bit, am I going to subject our readers and anime fans to NFL Draft discourse. The sheer number of Fan Duel ads would render them comatose, like a Victorian child discovering dubstep.

Speaking of discourse, though, do you remember a couple of years back when the Kansas City Chiefs lost to the Bengals in the AFC championship?

I swear I’m going somewhere with this.

Ooooh~ You talking about when Mahomes/Reid totally mismanaged the clock like five yards from the endzone???

Technically, yes, but I’m talking about the narrative aspect of it. Despite this being the Chiefs’ fourth straight trip to the conference championship and a mere two seasons removed from winning the Super Bowl, I remember a lot of chatter about how that loss was a sign the team was washed. People said Reid had gotten his one big win and needed to retire, and they predicted Mahomes was doomed to the Aaron Rodgers curse of spending a decade futilely chasing a second ring.

Two years later, the Chiefs are back-to-back champs and have become the unanimous Final Boss of the NFL. All that talk about them being washed seems totally crazy and off the mark, yet at the time, it was taken seriously in many spaces.

Aw, that is a perfect metaphor for the state of Jump! There’s no such thing as a dynasty that doesn’t take on at least a couple of losses each season, but so long as they stay on top when it counts, it doesn’t matter.

As an audience, we are also prone to running with dramatic narratives. Big Thing Continues To Be Big And Succesful isn’t an exciting story for anyone but shareholders. We want the drama of an institution faltering and teetering on the edge. We crave the speculative chaos of it. It’s fun! Yet, it rarely pans out that way. Pat Mahomes has three Lombardi trophies, Taylor Swift makes more money than God, and Jump probably won’t fall off after a couple of popular series finishes.

Doomerism does bring in clicks, and, at the end of the day, we should keep in mind that we’re talking about a magazine/division of a giant publishing company. It’s fun to speculate about Jump’s future, and it is important to be mindful of how Shueisha affects the artistic industry, but you shouldn’t make a brand a major part of your identity. If Weekly Shonen Jump did suddenly go away, that would be weird and kind of suck as there’d be one fewer paying outlet in the manga industry, but the art form would live on, and the industry would figure out how to profit from a now underserved readership.

We need to channel that energy into more productive means. Gas up your favorite wavering Jump title like you’re trying to sell a bridge in Brooklyn! Shill like you own a rabidly depreciating NFT! Get out there and get on the bottom floor of Green Green Greens before it becomes the next Attack on Titan everybody!

Hey, if that’s what we’re doing, folks are WAY ahead of us on Kagurabachi. I’m still not sure if it’s actually good, but people sure do like saying it is!

It’s off to a strong start, but I remain skeptical. So I suppose we’ll call it the CJ Stroud of Jump and see how it does in its second season as a starter. We’ll save the rest for the next segment of our 30-part series “Explaining Sports To Weebs.”

Aw yeah! We’ll bait ’em in with Chargers schedule announcement videos and keep ’em around with arguments that are even more pedantic than what they’re used to!

Have you heard of power scaling? We’ll get ready to figure out who you should draft in round 8 of a fantasy football league!