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.
Organization
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.
Schedule and Numbering
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, each issue's cover being 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 preceding 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 promise extra material for the issue.
Digital Release
Notwithstanding a few special releases in 2011 and 2013, Shueisha began publishing fully digital editions of Jump with 2014's Issue 25 - June 2.[6] These are released simultaneously with their print counterparts, and feature largely identical content; distribution occurs mainly through Shueisha's Jump Book Store and Jump+ platforms, along with a number of third-party sellers.
Publication of One Piece
As mentioned, Jump began serializing the One Piece manga with 1997 Issue 34. Since then, the series has maintained steady weekly publication, running a chapter in a majority of the issues published in a given year. Eiichiro Oda started to take regular breaks around 10 years into the serialization, eventually reaching a total of roughly 10 breaks per year since 2013. These breaks are generally spread out throughout the year and almost never skip more than one issue at a time. There are currently two notable exceptions:
A full month of vacation—skipping four consecutive issues—followed his completing the first half of the series.[7]
A second month-long hiatus—skipping four consecutive issues—at the conclusion of the Wano Country Arc.[8]
The following table presents the full publication history of One Piece in Jump.[9] Note that all years are based on Jump's own indexing, which can differ from the actual year of publication (see Schedule and Numbering above).
As a preeminent Jump property, One Piece has been directly featured on a number of its covers.[10] 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.
Lead Covers
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.
There have been four instances of a One Piece Jump illustration being split into multiple covers.
Shonen Jump 2009 Issue 53 and 2010 Issues 1 & 2
Shonen Jump 2017 Issues 2-3 & 4-5
Shonen Jump 2019 Issues 34 & 35
Shonen Jump 2021 Issues 3-4 & 5-6
Shonen Jump 2009 Issue 53 and 2010 Issues 1 & 2 celebrate the premiere of One Piece Film: Strong World. The cover features the Straw Hat Pirates in their Strong World outfits as well as various animals from the film. This is the only instance of a triple joint cover to date.
Shonen Jump 2017 Issues 2-3 & 4-5 celebrate the anniversary year in which One Piece achieves 20 years of serialization. The cover features Luffy in the middle forming the number "20" with his fingers. He is surrounded by protagonists from other Shonen Jump series dressed as One Piece characters.
Shonen Jump 2019 Issues 34 & 35 celebrate One Piece achieving 22 years old serialization, the movie Stampede and the second act of the Wano Country Arc. The cover features Luffy in middle holding Nidai Kitetsu, with Zoro, Sanji, Nami and Robin on the left side, and Law, Sabo, Hancock and Lucci on the left. The Straw Hats are dressed in their Wano Arc outfits, while the other characters wear unique Wano-themed outfits.
Shonen Jump 2021 Issues 3-4 & 5-6 in 2021 celebrate Chapter 1000. The cover features Luffy with a crown that says "1000" on his head. He is surrounded by protagonists from other Shonen Jump series together with various One Piece characters drawn in the style of the protagonists' respective authors. The list of characters is the following:
One Piece characters as drawn by Shonen Jump authors.
The joint covers of Shonen Jump and Shonen Sunday.
The cover of Shonen Jump 2022 Issue 34 forms a joint cover together with Weekly Shōnen Sunday 2022 Issue 35. Shonen Sunday is a weekly shōnen manga magazine published by a different publshing company called Shogakukan. The joint cover was part of a collaboration between Eiichiro Oda and Gosho Aoyama, the author of Detective Conan (Case Closed). The illustration features Monkey D. Luffy and Roronoa Zoro with Detective Conan characters Conan Edogawa and Rei Furuya.
Related Titles
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.
Translation and Dub Issues
Since 2002, VIZ Media has maintained an English-language Shonen Jump title in a number of different formats:
Initially, it was published as a monthly print magazine that averaged between 300 and 400 pages per issue; its selection of series was somewhat different (and smaller) than its Japanese counterpart's, focusing heavily on those with preexisting anime adaptations.[11][12] To compensate, it usually serialized multiple chapters of every ongoing series per issue, in addition to previewing many others (such as Rosario + Vampire) and running exclusive columns and interviews.
In 2012, Shonen Jump was converted to the weekly, digital-exclusive Shonen Jump Alpha. This title was significantly more streamlined, and focused on series running concurrently in Japan, publishing single chapters two weeks behind their Japanese counterparts.[13]
In 2013, Jump Alpha was renamed Weekly Shonen Jump, its series having reached completely simultaneous publication with Japan.[14] Shortly after, Viz began the Jump Start initiative, running three-chapter previews of every new series in the Japanese Jump.[15]
In 2018, Jump was completely discontinued as a singular title, and converted into an app holding a digital "vault" of virtually every series under Viz's license. This app remains the ongoing model, offering select material (typically the premiere and two most recent chapters of any series) for free and the rest for subscription.[16]
One Piece was featured among the five series in Jump's premiere issue, and continued to be serialized through the title's entire print and digital runs. Initially, it lagged heavily behind the Japanese original, only finishing the Arabasta Arc in 2009. To address this, Jump (after summarizing the interim storylines in 2009's final issues) skipped to the beginning of the Impel Down Arc in 2010, and maintained serialization steadily enough to end its print run at the twelfth chapter of the Fish-Man Island Arc; with the digital conversion, it again skipped, re-beginning at Fish-Man Island's penultimate chapter.
In most respects, the Jump version of One Piece is identical to Viz's tankōbon version, apart from its larger pages and unconverted color material. Perhaps its only other notable difference is its use of Zoro in chapters printed before late 2004 (i.e. the beginning of the 4Kids anime).
Trivia
Oda's redesign of the Jump Pirate, from 2018's Issue 33.
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.
Coincidentally, Jump has used an eyepatch-wearing pirate as its primary mascot since its debut issue in 1968. This has been acknowledged by One Piece on at least two occasions:
In 2013's Issue 6-7, to commemorate the magazine's 45th anniversary, several ongoing creators produced omakes of the Jump Pirate interacting with their own characters; Oda's featured the Pirate posing as Tony Tony Chopper's long-lost brother (in hopes of exploiting Chopper's commercial popularity).[17]
In 2018's Issue 33, to commemorate its 50th anniversary, every ongoing creator redesigned the Jump Pirate and placed it somewhere in their latest chapter; Oda's redesign was worn by a Beasts Pirates scout in Chapter 911.[18]
↑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.
