Summary

• Shōnen Jump faces a major crisis as its biggest hits like One Piece and My Hero Academia are set to end within the next few years.
• Despite having popular titles like Undead Unluck and Sakamoto Days, Shōnen Jump struggles to cultivate a story as popular as its biggest hits.
• Shōnen Jump's rigid cancellation practices and lack of variety in its lineup are contributing to its decline in relevance and readership.

It's no secret that Weekly Shōnen Jump, if not the world. All three are currently the longest-running manga in the magazine, and their manga and anime adaptations are consistently popular among fans and critics alike, usually to a degree that far sures their competitors.

The current landscape of Weekly Shōnen Jump essentially revolves around One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen, and that’s created a big problem for the magazine. One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen are all set to end within the next few years, with the latter two ending sometime in 2024, and with no other manga having their level of popularity, Weekly Shōnen Jump is going to struggle to maintain readership and relevancy when they end.

It's been decades since anything like this happened, and it's hard to see how things could improve.

Nothing In Shōnen Jump's Current Lineup Lives Up To Its Biggest Hits

Most of Shōnen Jump's current lineup has yet to take off

As previously discussed, One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen's imminent endings pose a problem for Weekly Shōnen Jump because of how much the rest of the magazine's current lineup fails to live up to them. While mainstays like Undead Unluck, Sakamoto Days, and Akane-banashi are all fairly popular, no other shonen manga is as popular as One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen, as shown by those three being the only Shōnen Jump manga among the best-selling manga of 2023. As such, it's hard to see any of them being able to the magazine in a few years.

Even the newer manga can't be relied upon to lead Weekly Shōnen Jump in a few years. MamaYuyu and Nue's Exorcist have both struggled to make waves, and while Kill Blue and Kagurabachi have both become popular fairly quickly, it’s still hard to tell if their popularity will last, so they can’t be relied upon, either. No matter how one looks at it, there’s nothing in Weekly Shonen Jump's current lineup that measures up to One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen, and that's unlikely to change as things stand.

Shōnen Jump's Current Situation Is a Repeat Of the 1990s

Shōnen Jump has had this problem before

What makes the current situation with Weekly Shōnen Jump especially bad is that they already faced a similar situation in the 1990s. During the 90s, Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk were the most popular manga in the magazine, and when Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk ended, Weekly Shōnen Jump's circulation steadily dropped from 6.53 million copies to 4.15 million. One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen's imminent ending puts Weekly Shōnen Jump in a similar situation, so the people in charge seemingly doing nothing to prevent it makes it even worse.

The way things turned around for Weekly Shōnen Jump in the 90s also shows why they're in trouble now. While circulation never fully recovered, Weekly Shōnen Jump in the 1990s was undoubtedly saved by popular manga like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Naruto, and, of course, One Piece, and as such, there's an obvious problem with One Piece now legitimately being on the verge of ending. One Piece, as popular as it is, only helped stabilize circulation to a certain extent, but when it, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen end, things will likely be even worse than they were in the 90s.

Shōnen Jump's Rigid Cancellation Practices Have Come Back To Hurt Them

The magazine has slowly become its own worst enemy in how it handles the longevity of new series

There are a variety of factors that have contributed to Weekly Shōnen Jump's current state, and one of the biggest is probably their rigid cancelation practices. Weekly Shōnen Jump is infamous for being quick to cancel a manga if it isn't even moderately successful early on, and that’s made it almost impossible for any manga to take off in the magazine. Granted, there were plenty of manga that deserved to be canceled, but it's too hard for new manga to take their time developing their story, thus creating the current situation of the magazine having too little to itself.

Manga From Other Publications Are Slowly Overtaking Weekly Shōnen Jump

Shōnen Jump is no longer the king of manga

Another contributing factor to Weekly Shōnen Jump's current situation is the fact that other magazines are slowly overtaking it in popularity. While Weekly Shōnen Jump has always produced the biggest anime and manga in the world, over the years, other magazines have produced works that have become just as popular as Shōnen Jump’s, if not more. In 2023, alone, two of the best-selling manga in the world—Tokyo Revengers and Blue Lock—were from Weekly Shōnen Magazine, with Blue Lock even being the best-selling manga of the year, so it’s clear that Shōnen Jump no longer has a monopoly on sales.

Granted, Shōnen Jump still dominated the sales charts in 2023, but the specifics of that only exacerbate the problem. While most of the best-selling manga of 2023 were Shōnen Jump manga, One Piece, My Hero Academia, Slam Dunk, and Jujutsu Kaisen were the only bestsellers from Weekly Shōnen Jump, specifically, as every other best-selling Shōnen Jump manga was simply from a Weekly Shōnen Jump like Weekly Young Jump or Shōnen Jump+. The manga landscape is slowly turning away from Weekly Shōnen Jump, specifically, and that will only get worse when its biggest hits end in a few years.

Weekly Shōnen Jump's Lack Of Variety Is Starting To Hurt It

Despite remaining popular for housing several iconic series, the magazine has become too one note

If there's anything that’s truly hurting Weekly Shōnen Jump, however, it's how little diversity there is in the magazine. Weekly Shōnen Jump is known for its action and comedy stories, and those are the majority of stories that are published in the magazine, but after so many decades of Weekly Shōnen Jump publishing the same types of stories, most of which barely even leave an impact, the magazine is steadily beginning to be unappealing to people. Other publications have been known to experiment with the manga they publish, but unfortunately, Weekly Shōnen Jump doesn’t have as long a history of doing that, themselves.

Adding to that is how too many Weekly Shōnen Jump manga are derivative of other works. Many of their action-adventure manga follow the same beats as One Piece, there are a lot of stories of underdog protagonists in super-powered settings like My Hero Academia, and in response to Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, many new manga have revolved around people fighting some variation of demons. In short, far too many Shonen Jump manga fail to offer anything that isn't provided from the pre-established hits, so it makes sense why they’ve started to lose popularity.

That isn't to say that Weekly Shōnen Jump never experiments, even now. Manga like Sakamoto Days, Blue Box, and Akane-banashi are some of the most popular stories in Weekly Shōnen Jump right now, with Sakamoto Days redefining battle manga with its inventive fight scenes and Blue Box and Akane-banashi winning over fans and critics alike with their great writing, despite both of them being different forms of slice-of-life manga, so the magazine isn’t without its variety. However, manga like that, especially successful ones, are still too rare, and this is the worst time for the magazine to not change that.

What The Next Few Years Will Mean For Weekly Shōnen Jump & Manga, In General

How manga might change forever

There are a lot of factors that have contributed to Weekly Shōnen Jump's current state, and it paints a big picture of what might happen because of that within the next few years. One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen all ending within the next few years means that Weekly Shōnen Jump will be devoid of any major ongoing series, and despite having some promising newcomers, none of them look like they can become a flagship series at the moment. Because of that, circulation will likely decline until new manga start to take off, assuming that even happens.

The current situation has much wider implications for the entire manga industry, however. Over the years, manga publications have gradually stopped pushing for stories to run for years and years without any sign of stopping, with one of the biggest examples being Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba ending after only four years at the absolute height of its popularity. With that in mind, One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen’s respective endings could be the end of long-form weekly manga, as there will be very few notable weekly manga with years of serialization behind them left at that point.

While there's plenty of data and other hard evidence that paints a negative picture of things, at the end of the day, it's impossible to truly know what will happen. The manga industry is incredibly unpredictable, so it might not be long until Shōnen Jump has another flagship series in their ranks, whether it's something they have already published or a new work, entirely. Things will probably get worse before they get better once One Piece, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen end, but it's far too premature to see this as the end of Weekly Shōnen Jump, as a whole.

Source: Comipress.