Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - What's Weekly Shonen Jump's Next Big Manga?
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malvarez1
Posts: 1687 |
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Hoping that more people discover The Elusive Samurai once the anime drops.
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njprogfan
 Collector Extraordinaire Posts: 1162 Location: A River Named Toms |
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Ruri Dragon is incredible. The character writing is extremely well done, so natural and believable and my favorite current manga on the Shonen Jump site. I loved the early chapters so much I ended up buying the first Japanese volume to help support the mangaka. This needs to be printed in the west!
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1016 |
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Eh, Hero Academia will end in a year and so is JJK, I don't read OP anymore but but I don't think it will end in that time period.
However, I must admit that I always felt HeroAca would have some kind of sequel, is one of those series with an unexplored world and characters which would benefit from it, same thing with Fairy Tail. Right now there is nothing in Jump that can replace those 2, it will either be something new or a sequel since those are becoming increasingly popular lately. Maybe a Naruto Sequel, dunno why they never made one... |
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malvarez1
Posts: 1687 |
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I don’t doubt we’ll get more sequels, but those almost never run in the main magazine.
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BrazillianCara
Posts: 12 |
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Aside from MHA and JJK, Sakamoto Days also feels like it's in endgame territory, though it's not impossible for it to continue - I got the same feeling from Witch Watch before the end of what turned out to be Part 1 of the story. Overall, I'm glad that Undead Unluck will get to keep going safely.
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2126 |
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As always, Jajanken is invaluable for anyone curious about Jump's history.
The biggest crisis in their history was probably the year or so between the end of Slam Dunk and the start of One Piece -- look on Wikipedia, and you can see how sharply the magazine's circulation dropped from its 1995 peak. But looking at the lineup back then, they still had a bona fide A-lister in Rurouni Kenshin, and a smattering of pretty solid mid-listers. A lot of it is names I don't recognize, true, but I gather that Hareluya II Boy, Hell Teacher Nube, and Rokudenashi Blues were fairly popular in their day. JJBA's Golden Wind wasn't quite Stardust Crusaders, but still nothing to sneeze at, and they still had Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai for at least a little while. And right after Slam Dunk ended they got Hoshin Engi, and before long came Yu-Gi-Oh! -- then I''s, a romance still fondly remembered by fans who are old enough. Then of course One Piece became a smash hit. By the time you add Hunter x Hunter, Shaman King, Hikaru no Go, The Prince of Tennis, and of course Naruto over the next two years, I think you can call it a solid recovery. (It does interest me that on Wikipedia's chart, you can see further decline in the decade from 1998 to 2008, well before digital started cutting into things. That was an era when Jump had plenty of heavy hitters, so maybe the story there is that readers were shifting more to collected volumes?) When I reread the first six chapters of RuriDragon before the resumption, I tried to seriously think about what makes it tick, and why so many people loved such an understated series. I concluded that its biggest strengths were clarity and naturalism. You've got a perfectly clear premise with a good elevator pitch, clear art, clear personalities, clear emotions, and clear relationships, all wrapped up in a strong, relatable metaphor for teen awkwardness. That clarity is pretty tough to achieve for any storyteller, and it's undervalued -- think about your average monster-fighting manga that gets bogged down in cluttered lore and cluttered art. Or how people have been talking since Toriyama died about his gift for fluid, readable compositions. As for naturalism, admittedly some of what I'm seeing is the translator's work, and I'm not in a position to judge if the original dialogue is as good. But even beyond that, you can see a naturalistic approach uncommon in manga, with a heavy emphasis on how all the little details of life keep happening. ("Your dad has horns, so now you do too. Here's your toast." Or chapter 2: "Ooh, nice sale on this.") Beyond that, there's a portrayal of adolescent goofiness that feels remarkably genuine, compared to how many manga take more of a "just hook the angst/anger/horny/spokon right into my veins" approach. On simulpubs… well, people have talked about how they've affected fandom's view before. But that's what gets me -- it's been talked about several times before. Because it's been a thing for a while now. Viz started doing this in what, 2019? Before Mission: Yozakura Family, Samurai 8, and The Last Saiyuki; after Act-Age and Jujutsu Kaisen. (And beforehand, they had that first-three-chapters thing with the likes of Noah's Notes.) That's five years ago now. Fandom's had time to get used to it. But you still see people complain about the policies of Jump editorial "these days", without thinking about when "these days" started. Note on the disparities between English and Japanese readerships: For some time, I've been noting the readership numbers on Manga Plus for WSJ titles and keeping rankings. Me & Roboco is consistently dead last there, but just above that has generally been The Elusive Samurai. Which is modestly popular in Japan (though not an AssClass-tier hit), and I can recognize it has fun characters and action, but it's so reliant on 14th-century Japanese history that international readers clock out. I doubt an anime will change that, at least without some viral sakuga. Kagurabachi I dropped out of after chapter 12. Seems to have strong sales in Japan, though, so I guess it's the real deal beyond just the international memes. Maybe it's just not my thing nowadays -- hell, I burned out on JJK during the Shibuya arc, and I even stopped reading Sakamoto Days after chapter 128. (Chainsaw Man is still great, though.) |
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kgw
 Posts: 1066 Location: Spain, EU |
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I think too many people outside Japan are sleeping on Kill Blue*, by the author of Kuroko's Basket (whose name I've forgotten). Although it seems to be part of the "assassins are the new ninjas/exorcists" wave, it's actually quite funny. The main character is an assassin who returns to his 14-year-old self and finds that... the whole life he left behind (school, studies, club activities**) is fun and he enjoys being a kid with hardly any problems in the world. Until crazy killers show up, but even then.
* well, at least in some countries is already licensed. ** No, no romance at all. That's one of the funniest parts. |
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R. Kasahara
 Posts: 658 |
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I read an article about this recently! It is goofy, and sometimes annoying. Anyway, part of the fun of Jump is seeing what they come up with across the years. And speaking of cancellations, it's been enjoyable reading the author's notes in Akira Toriyama's Manga Theater about how unsuccessful many of his early efforts were. It's inspirational for mangaka, if nothing else! Akane-banashi is fantastic and I would love for it to inexplicably become the next big Shonen Jump Monster Hit (tm). And yeah, would be very surprised if MHA doesn't end this year. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5936 |
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I hope not this last act has had a lot of ass pulls and dragging as is. Without needing more of it
I know you’re joking but given how divisive part 2 of Naruto was and how divisive Boruto is it seems to me that making sequels isn’t really what the fandom wants/can’t make up their minds on. |
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zztop
Posts: 646 |
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Hero Academia has that one spinoff prequel, Hero Academia Vigilantes, which seems to take place some years before the main series (has new characters, but some characters from the OG series turn up there). And Fairy Tail has the currently ongoing 100 Years Quest spinoff sequel. |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1561 |
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I guess the glut of exorcist manga makes sense in a way. Even though the genre just makes me roll my eyes at this point, it has been a reliable genre for Jump. Yu Yu Hakusho, Hell Teacher Nube, Bleach, and now Jujutsu Kaisen, have all been some of Jump's biggest hits, and they all belonged to this genre. Of course all of them had something unique to them that set them apart from the Shadow Eliminators of the world. But given that track record I think Jump is happy to throw lots of similar manga unto the page, knowing that nine of out ten times they'll die but the tenth attempt might be their next big franchise.
Speaking of the next big thing, the fact that Jump managed to lure the creator of Tokyo Revengers away from Weekly Shonen magazine is a pretty big deal, and I have to wonder if this is part of their plan to deal with the impending ending to two of the current Big Three. Astro Royale is only in its second week so there's no telling if it will be Jump's next big battle manga, but if it is, I wonder if Jump might start headhunting other big-name creators away from their competitors. I hear Eden's Zero is supposed to be ending soon, maybe the tireless Hiro Mishima might be interested in switching employers? Just saying. Time and sales figures will tell if this marks the start of a new, more aggressive hiring strategy for Jump, or just an interesting footnote. |
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Shay Guy
Posts: 2126 |
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Another thought:
It's entirely possible a day will come when WSJ is no longer the most-sold manga magazine. But it would have to decline a lot. If Wikipedia's list is correct, last year it did more than triple the numbers of the #2 magazine, WSM. And Jump sells more than seven times as much as Weekly Shonen Sunday -- a magazine which is still running, mind you, regularly producing manga popular enough to get anime, and not expected to go anywhere anytime soon. Even if it's a long ways from the serious competitor to Jump that it once was. So I don't think anyone needs to worry about WSJ before its circulation drops by a factor of seven. And that's all without taking into account the many branch magazines and Shonen Jump+. "Jump" is still the strongest brand in manga -- on top of everything from One Piece to Akane-banashi, it's Spy x Family, Kaiju No. 8, Blue Exorcist, Oshi no Ko, Kingdom, Hyakkano. Of the ten most popular manga last year (going by how high they got on the per-volume Oricon chart), seven were Jump-branded, the exceptions being Tokyo Revengers, Blue Lock, and TenSura. It's got a looooong way to drop before another brand overtakes it. |
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maximilianjenus
Posts: 2864 |
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My favorite part about kagura bachi is that the author said the he can't draw women, which most likely means traditionally feminine ones, but unlike one piece, instead of getting badly drawn bimbos, we are getting tomboys, tomboys all the way and I think that is an absolute win.
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Saffire
 Posts: 1256 Location: Iowa, USA |
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I mean, Prince of Tennis is also accidental gay camp (and possibly not even that accidental!) so Death Note lining up alongside it tracks pretty well!
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1016 |
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Because Boruto and DBS are terrible character breaking glorified fanfic nonsense. Other "lesser" series like Fairy Tail and Gash Bell have perfect sequels and nobody complains about them. Hell, even the dumpster fire Nanatsu no Taizai was able to pull a descent sequel, this is an skill issue. |
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