Weekly Shonen Jump (週刊少年ジャンプ,Shūkan Shōnen Janpu?, commonly stylized as Weekly Jump or simply Jump in English) is a weekly manga magazine published by Shueisha. It is responsible for serializing the One Piece manga - among many others - in its original, single-chapter form.
Since its inception in 1968, Weekly Shonen Jump has sold over 7.5 billion copies (with weekly circulation exceeding 6.5 million at its height in the 1990s), consistently ranking as the world's most popular comic-book anthology.[1] It remains a particularly important outlet for new manga creators, many of whom - Eiichiro Oda included - developed their skills as assistants for its established creators.
As its title suggests, Weekly Shonen Jump primarily targets the shonen demographic of teenage and pre-teen boys, and trends toward series with majority-male casts and spectacle-heavy plots (though recent polls have indicated several of its series, One Piece included, may actually have majority-female readerships).[2] In addition to One Piece, it has launched some of Japan's most iconic shonen properties, including KochiKame, Dragon Ball, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Rurouni Kenshin, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Naruto, Bleach, and My Hero Academia.
(In 2016, with the conclusion of the long-running KochiKame (and the migration of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to an offshoot magazine some years before), One Piece became Jump's oldest active series. The closest contender, Hunter x Hunter, began in 1998 and publishes new material on an inconsistent basis.)
The typical issue of Jump is between 450 and 500 pages long, containing around twenty different installments of manga interspersed with editorial features, celebrity interviews, advertisements, and other promotional materials (often for anime or video games licensed off one of its manga series). Its print quality is frequently noted to be "yellowed" or otherwise substandard, as it primarily uses recycled paper.[3]
Every issue prints the first few pages of several different series in color; for One Piece, this usually manifests in the series' famed color spreads.
Table of contents for a standard 2011 issue, featuring One Piece as the week's Lead Color. Note how all the color features are set apart from the standard ones.
Jump famously reorganizes the order of its contents every week, following a combination of editor initiative and reader response.[4] These are (imperfectly) reflected by each issue's table of contents:
One series will be the Lead Color (巻頭カラー,Kantōkarā?) feature, printed in color for its first few pages and placed ahead of all others. The issue's cover-art will usually - but not always - be focused on this series.
Several series will be Center Color (センターカラー,Sentākarā?) features, and also printed in color for their first few pages. These may be placed anywhere after the Lead Color feature; in some cases, they may even be the last feature.
The remaining features will be printed in standard black-and-white.
When charting series popularities, fans typically focus on the black-and-white features' ordering, dismissing the color features' as purely editorial decisions. The exact accuracy of this metric is debatable; while most color features are promotional in nature (indeed, Jump traditionally features the first chapter of any new series as a Lead Color), and series that consistently rank last as black-and-white features are often ended within a few months, there have been notable exceptions to both patterns.
In any case, One Piece is almost always placed among the first four features of any given issue, colored or otherwise. It has maintained this dominance since at least the mid-2000s.
Jump typically releases new issues on Mondays of each week, with semi-regular shifts to other days (most often preceding Saturdays) when the printing schedule is affected by "minor" holidays or other incidents. However, there are four "major" holidays whose corresponding weeks skip release entirely:
New Year's Day, usually corresponding to the first week in January
Golden Week, usually corresponding to the first week in May
Obon, usually corresponding to the second or third week in August
Christmas, usually corresponding to the last week in December
Issues are indexed by year, and each issue's cover billed with a number (which resets with every new year) and a specific date; the issue that published the first chapter of One Piece, for instance, is billed as 1997's Issue 34 - August 4. Note that these, much like the cover dates of American comics, tend to be weeks or even months behind each issue's actual release date, with the "first" issue in any given year usually released in late November of the previous year.[5]
Any issues released immediately before major-holiday weeks are billed as "double" issues (e.g. Issue 4-5). This is purely to help the indexing process, and does not in any way indicate extra material for the issue.
As a preeminent Jump property, One Piece has been directly featured on a number of its covers.[6] These cover illustrations - almost always supplied by Eiichiro Oda - are frequently reused to illustrate the title pages (or back covers) of subsequent tankobon, and always reproduced in the Color Walk collections.
Jump typically makes One Piece its Lead Color feature between four and seven times per year. These issues also reproduce a portion of the cover-art - usually cropped to focus on Luffy's face - on the spine.
Due to its popularity, Weekly Jump has accrued many offshoot titles with different formats and target demographics. Most of these are irrelevant to One Piece, but several were responsible for publishing Eiichiro Oda's pre-One Piece one-shots, most prominently the later-canonized Monsters.
The Shonen Jump logo with the Straw Hats Jolly Roger from the 34th issue of 2018.
To commemorate the series 20th anniversary being published in Shonen Jump magazine, the 33rd issue of the 2017 (that was released on the anniversary) used the same Luffy from the 34th issue of 1997 (that Chapter 1 was released on).
Some manga chapters that were released in the 2017 33rd issue had a Straw Hat featured somewhere in its story.
To commemorate the magazine 50th year of publication, the Shonen Jump logo was featured in every manga chapter released on the 34th issue of 2018.
↑Oda commented on Jump's paper quality (or lack thereof) in a 2007 interview with the website Manga Heaven. Retrieved here, translated here.
↑SBSOne Piece Manga — Vol. 47 (p. 106), Oda explains that reader response is only one of the factors influencing how Jump orders its features, and the ultimate decision lies with senior editors, who may choose to "front-load" any given series for promotional reasons.
