Shonen Jump ToC Rankings

RuriDragon: AAAND WE'RE BACK! At least Ruri's electricity problem calmed down... Then, her with I'm guessing Maeda (?), and Ruri finding out that dragons bring down lightning. So, more puberty...
Kill Blue: Well there goes Juuzou's normal school life... JARDIN's Yoshitsune Biwaki took his friends hostage, and now, he's forced to fight with all cards face up WITH SHIDOU ON THE FRONT SEAT OF THE ACTION... No going back!
Choujou: A robot joins the Chinjuku West Police Force, and goes on to try to get Choujou to do his fucking job. As if this manga will ever permit that, so he ends up getting rebellious in their futile attempts to convert him. It took force from Ippongi to humble them...
Kagurabachi: Center Color! (and an absolutely stunning one at that!) So the Sazanami clan has Shin, and of course they can't get it so easily... Also, shit, Hakuri got found...
Dear Anemone: Gaku defeating a basket star to save his friend which was accomplished by part of Anemone's body mixing with his...
Nue no Onmyouji: End of saving Shitotsu, but the start of another round of battle!
Green Green Greens: The next holes have been pretty bad for Yaezaki, but by Hole 5, he was able to get a double bogey, a named score at last! That's one step forward, but now, to get past Nadeshiko by the next hole...
MamaYuyu: Right, time to face this fuck Grisha...
Ruirui Senki: NOOOO YAYOIIIII!! With him down, Aoba ends up falling to his brother Zen's hands... Cue another fight, and the intro to Aoba's SISTER (SLAYYY!)...

Re: Witch Watch, why do even Japanese schools give kids a copy of The Little Match Girl? Don’t let Nico read that, please.

The recent events in World Trigger have been exciting, even though we’re still in the exam arc and Ashihara-sensei is down to one chapter a month. I just hope he can keep going.

Edited by Sailor11sedna on Mar 5th 2024 at 10:41:21 AM

The entire exam arc in World Trigger has been fascinating. It really distills the essence of the series— trying to outplay each other via tactics and wits.

This ToC will be a short one:

• In the cover, we have Jujutsu Kaisen celebrating the series anniversary, which include an online popularity contest, so you can participate if you wanna try.

• Greens recieves a colour page to possibly increase/gauge it's popularity, but it remains to be seen if it will help. It's a bit weird that Shadow Eliminators isn't getting the same treatment next week, but maybe it will be the one after that.

• It still makes me happy to see Ruri Dragon in the magazine.

Akira Toriyama has passed away. RIP to the legend.

I wonder how long it will take until the Shounen Jump makes a homage issue for Toriyama? Since these things take time, maybe in 2 or 3 more weeks? The man deserved that and more.

Edited by Shadow-Whisperer on Mar 7th 2024 at 10:35:19 AM

And they should give him a posthumous medal for contribution to culture, or something.

They already have! It's the Tokyo Anime Awards Festival right now, and they gave him an Achievement Award!

When One Piece ends, what's the chance of the next longest series being forced to continue (and not move to a different style of publication like Black Clover for example), so that we don't have the biggest series ending too quickly after another? Allegedly, the reason for Akagi's 20-year mahjong battle was so that it's magazine wouldn't end up without a big selling point.

Roboco will have to step up her game then, if she is truly to become the new face of the magazine.

But while this sounds funny, take into account there are 4 series in between Roboco and One Piece: My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen (both ending this year, not counting proplonged hiatus), Mission: Yozakura Family and Undead Unlcuk (both in their respectives "part 2", leading to an ending but with many things to do, so maybe 2-3 years more).

Roboco interestingly is the longest running series without a visible "clock" (to anyone who doesn't read it, while the series is an absurdist parody, it has continuity), so I believe it has the best chance to still be running by the point One Piece ends. It could then be like a second Kochikame, the comedy series that was in the Shounen Jump for many, many years.

Ah yes, Kochikame also had over 200 volumes.

RIP to Toriyama, a man who literally reshaped manga/anime through DBZ and arguably did the same with gaming through his art for Dragon Quest (which has in turn seeped into other media including manga/anime). Truly a legend who will be missed.

Regarding series length it's legit hard to tell how things will go considering the Long Runner is basically dead. Why forcibly drag a series out when the likes of Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen can tap out after 4-5 years and still be milked for absolute shit-tons of money? Roboco's an exception here because it's an entrenched gag manga - it can literally last for as long as Shuhei Miyazaki has jokes he wants to write and as long as people are reading it. But even if editorial's cranking the screws to keep Roboco on...it's obviously just to ensure there's at least one recognizable name in the mag. It's not like Roboco can or even should be expected to sell the magazine by itself.

Just you wait, in 15 years when Roboco ends, the same way every series included the iconic eyebrow in the issue Kochikome ended, those future series then will have to make a knee joke .

Shonen Jump does seem to have shied away from super long runners, or perhaps the new authors simply don't write stories like that, at least not ones that can catch on well enough.

The perception might be a little skewed, since short series will naturally outnumber the long series. We can only be certain quite a whileafter the fact, that the age of long series is over. Or, if we'd rank every series by amount of volumes, which is the biggest difference between two places? (other than one piece to kochikame)

I think it's a little bit of Column A, little bit of Column B.

From the writing end it's already very well documented how grueling the weekly shonen manga timeline is and it feels like more and more mangaka are empowering themselves to peace out on their own terms rather than be subjected to be forced to draw out via Executive Meddling. Demon Slayer seems to be the codifier in proving you can have a relatively brisk story^note One that, let's be clear, was also clearly rushing to keep that brisk pace and still be a mega-success, though before that I would've pointed at the likes of The Promised Neverland.

From the editorial end they definitely aren't pushing to draw things out the way that they used to, and there's probably many reasons why. Maybe there's been enough health scare stories with the likes of Oda and Horikoshi for them to feel like they have to be more mindful of that, or maybe they're seeing reader habits change (especially in this digital age for Jump) and believe they'd be better off more consistently letting stories rotate in and out vs. relying on a handful of entrenched bulwarks.

And then Column C may be readers themselves, between those who may be just be getting tired of the same series faster and those who freak out at potential Archive Panic and opt-out entirely. On the latter case it does seem like sub-300 chapters is still within the realm of being accessible to new readers (thanks in part to digital subscriptions making catching up and keeping up cheap and easy to do) though we haven't really tested to see where the tolerance threshold actually lies. So for example Black Clover and My Hero Academia both seem to be within it which so maybe around 400ish is still okay...though Horikoshi and Tabata have also had documented health problems so maybe that might not actually be well, at least for the mangaka themselves.

Maybe Toriyama's tribute should be the magazine skipping an issue out of mourning.

RuriDragon: Mother-daughter bonding sure looks fun!
Dear Anemone: Dealing with some asshole of a beast featuring a bit of a level up, and then, whoever this hun is at the end...
Green Green Greens: Center Color!! WOAH! Got the birdie he wished for after figuring out the truth from that statement that golf is a sport where you chase the ideal...
Choujou-Senpai: Robo-kun on the verge of being released from the force. It took teaming with Choujou-senpai in a case to catch the Speed King to get the police head to reverse his stance. And so, Robo-kun has fallen to Choujou's level...
Kill Blue: In a sightseeing bus, the Juuzou fan gets to fight the real deal! As for Shidou, at least the shit with him gets put on hold for now... Next Chspter Center Color!!
Kagurabachi: Big brother Souya tries to take Hakuri back, but gets stopped and pulled into a fight instead!
Nue no Onmyouji: Yajima on beast mode, and Nue descends! Next Chapter Center Color!!
Ruirui Senki: Ok, Aoba's past by next chapter! Apart from that, a league of eliminators and some new faces...
MamaYuyu: SLAYYYYY-

You know, the way Dragon Ball went is as if Luffy found the one piece after fighting buggy, but then the story continued with something completely non pirate-ish.

eh, the Dragon Balls are more Bulma's goal, Goku's own goal really comes into being the arc after.

Wasn´t Gokus goal in early Dragonball just pretty much to hang on to the 4-star Dragonball as a memento to his Grandfather? He only lost it a few times to people either stealing it, or because the need to make a wish outweighing his want to keep it. I think his goal shifted to becoming the strongest some time after defeating the Red Ribbon army.

Well, but a Journey to the West retelling is very different from what came afterwards.

The ones with the best potential as long-runners aren’t using the weekly publication format: One-Punch Man, World Trigger, and (ironically) Dragon Ball Super. As a greedy consumer, I have to say good riddance to weekly publication. Even for the mangaka trying to get their feet in the door; they should shoot for a chapter every other week. “He was young and inexperienced, so we had him write forty nine chapters last year— oh no, he got a brain tumor! Darn, just when it was getting good.” I hope Shonen Jump and all the other publishers are getting sick of this.

that riddance is probably still some time away from actually happening, though.

Yu-Gi-Oh! would not have survived in today's ruthless environment. Shonen Jump is screwing themselves over with not only a breakneck schedule, but also a cutthroat business model that kills even highly promising series before giving them a real chance. It's telling that Red Hood and PPPPPP ended with them essentially flipping off Shonen Jump.

Edited by mythbuster on Mar 13th 2024 at 4:54:01 AM