True, such series as Mazinger Z and KochiKame were certainly important, but nowhere near as influential: penned by Tetsuo Hara and beginning in 1983, it ran until 1988 and carved an incredible legacy for itself along the way. Perhaps the first true Weekly Shonen Jump hit was Fist of the North Star. Yet, when the 1980s hit, something changed in Weekly Shonen Jump: it began to produce one hit after another, moulding an entire generation. Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine was, for the majority of the post-war years, king in terms of both circulation and influence – such series as Ashita no Joe and GeGeGe no Kitaro dominated the 1960s and 70s. Launched in 1968 as an offshoot of Shueisha’s Shonen Book (the company was in itself an offshoot of Shogakukan), the magazine took a long while before it finally took off. This might come as a surprise when, historically, Weekly Shonen Jump was late to the party. In this sense, Weekly Shonen Jump is incredibly important as it has a tremendous amount of influence on the standards of the medium. First issue of Weekly Shonen Jump, 1968īut how about creatively? As fans of manga, we are concerned not just with the ins and outs of the industry, but also the pursuit of creativity and self-expression. But even in the corporate world, it is always Jump series that seem to get pushed to the front of the pack: Attack on Titan Final Season’s delay while Jujutsu Kaisen continues on unabated seems to speak at least partially to that fact. In every corner of every classroom in the world, there is probably someone who reads Jump or a series that runs in it, and that is a powerful thing. Weekly Shonen Jump is Incredibly InfluentialĪs the largest manga magazine in the world, Weekly Shonen Jump commands an enormous amount of influence. At the end of the day, if we want to understand the manga industry if we want to understand the anime industry and if we want to understand the wider Japanese pop culture landscape as a whole, then we have to understand the importance of Weekly Shonen Jump. This cannot, however, come at the expense of understanding Weekly Shonen Jump. Of course, finding something new and unique is an attractive prospect for everyone, and I understand the allure of the indie. Perhaps it is a feature of the communities that I run with, but there are a growing number of people who actively avoid engaging with anything that comes out of the magazine and prefer to focus on less mainstream works. 43 of Weekly Shonen JumpĪnd yet, there is a growing indifference towards Weekly Shonen Jump. Even so, 100 million units is nothing to sniff at, especially when you consider the calibre of other series that are up there. Usually, we’d point to One Piece’s stupefying statistics to justify this fact, but this year has been particularly exciting as Koyoharu Gotouge’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba has actually overtook it. Along with the countless multimedia projects, we also have collected volumes: books that collect chapters of the magazine’s many series after they have been published in paper format.
Just looking at circulation alone, however, doesn’t provide the full picture. That’s even following a decades-long downturn in circulation, attributed mostly to the conclusion of popular series. In 2019, for example, it managed to shift 1,692,000 units in January through March alone while its closest rival, Weekly Shonen Magazine, managed to sell 715,417. In terms of circulation alone, it dwarfs all of the other publications out there. Weekly Shonen Jump is the biggest manga magazine in the world.