Why Are Long-Running Shonen Manga Getting Shorter?

Shonen manga, particularly that which is published in Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump, is at an interesting moment in its history as the flagbearers of the generation that ran in the 2010s, an era that can be referred to as the “Post-Big Three Era” due to its position as a moment in shōnen greatly defined by the phenomenon that was Shōnen Jump’s The Big Three: BLEACH, Naruto and One Piece. The Post-Big Three Era is a period in the history of Shōnen Jump that was headlined by titles like Koyoharu Gotoge’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Yuki Tabata’s Black Clover and Kohei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia, two of which ended and the last moved magazines.

Each of the aforementioned long-running manga all ended at a point that was relatively earlier than their predecessors, a fact that has become even more relevant with the advent of the digital age of manga currently led by publications like Shōnen Jump+. So, that begs the question: why are long-running shōnen manga in general getting shorter lives?

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A Quick Recap of Jump History

The Emergence of a Manga Giant

Weekly Shōnen Jump is a weekly shōnen manga anthology published under Shueisha’s “Jump” line of magazines, which has been running since the first issue was released on August 1, 1968. The magazine was established in July 1968 to compete with Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Shogakukan’s Weekly Shōnen Sunday, two highly successful publications that are running to this day.

Having sold over 7.5 billion copies since its inception, Weekly Shōnen Jump is the best-selling comic/manga magazine in history, with it reaching its highest weekly circulation–a figure of approximately 6.53 million copies each week–in the period between the mid-1980s to mid-1990s which has since been regarded as “the Golden Age of Jump”, a time when then editor-in-chief Hiroki Goto oversaw the run of titles like Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, Hirohiro Araki’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Tsukasa Hojo’s City Hunter, Nobuhiro Watsuki’s Rurouni Kenshin, Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk, and Yoshihiro Togashi’s Yu Yu Hakusho, to name a few.

The Big Three Era

The magazine’s circulation began to decline in the second half of the 1990s, after the end of various hit manga, including all the aforementioned except for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. The reason why the major titles that came up in the next generation came to be known as “The Big Three” is because they were the three titles that arose at around the same time after the end of the Golden Age, a time in which it was uncertain that the magazine would be able to maintain its position as the top-selling magazine of its kind. These three titles are unequivocally BLEACH, Naruto and One Piece. The Big Three Era came to an end in the mid-2010s, with the ending of Naruto in 2015 and BLEACH in 2016, but by then, a whole new generation of Shōnen Jump heroes had arisen; one defined by its position as the generation after The Big Three.

The three titles that defined this period were My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer and Black Clover, of which the first two have come to an end, and Black Clover is set to continue in Shōnen Jump’s monthly sister magazine, Jump GIGA. The Post-Big Three Era was further complicated by the rise of digital manga publications, and Weekly Shōnen Jump’s own digital counterpart, which came to host its own generation: the Dark Trio, defined by titles like Gege Akutami’s Jujutsu Kaisen, Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man and Yuji Kaku’s Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku, all of which ended very quickly compared to previous generations of Shōnen Jump manga, with Chainsaw Man continuing its second part in the same digital publication.

Comparing Generations

The Digital Age Sees The Shortest Average Series Length Since the Golden Age

Publishing in Shōnen Jump magazine, or any manga magazine, is incredibly difficult, and not to be taken for granted on any level. For the sake of comparison, we’ll only be looking at the most prominent titles to come out of a particular generation, not to mention those that have actually achieved a “long run” to begin with. Titles that are cut up into different parts that ultimately serve to build the same story will be considered together, provided they were all published in Shōnen Jump for the entirety of their runtime, but for the sake of simplicity, we will compare only the top 5 longest titles from each generation, by volume count.

The Digital Age of Shōnen Jump overlaps with the post-Big Three Era and the Dark Trio significantly, as the second part of Chainsaw Man has been published in Shōnen Jump+ since it began in July 2022. Some of the inaugural Jump+ titles, like Hetalia: Axis Powers, are still ongoing, but their sporadic release schedule means that the series doesn’t have as many volumes out as a series like World’s End Harem (2018). Jump+ has laxer editors and is less stringent about depictions of violence or sex, allowing for more explicit material that wouldn’t be in the print version of Shōnen Jump, which also attracted readers who might not have been interested in the titles running in the print magazine, as seen with the increase in female readership following the serialization of Spy x Family.

What About Other Major Publishers and Their Magazines?

The Longest Running Manga From Other Houses

While the trend has been clear in Jump, could we observe a similar trend taking place in the magazine’s closest competitors? In terms of weekly circulation and overall sales in their lifetimes, the next biggest shōnen manga magazines in Japan are Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Shogakukan’s Weekly Shōnen Sunday. Let’s dig up some of their longest-running series from the same time periods as above, starting with Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine:

It’s evident that the trend was the same in Weekly Shōnen Magazine’s long-running titles, but what about Shogakukan’s Weekly Shōnen Sunday?

There are many factors affecting how many overall volumes a title will put out in its lifetime, from hiatuses to extennuating circumstances (like a pandemic), but for simplicity’s sake, the trend we’re seeing in Shōnen Jump is the same in its closest competitors, and likely, the industry at large.

Speculation: Why Are They Getting Shorter?

A Complex Web of Circumstances

For pretty much all the magazines in the manga industry, the best days are behind them, with the highest levels of circulation of the major players in the industry being in the same general time period. It could be that now that the biggest magazines have long been established, there is decreased need for long-running titles to captivate readers for decades. It could be that there is more competition than ever, and long-running titles might be phased out earlier than before in favour of fresher titles, which are now coming in faster than ever.

The Pressure

Some might be inclined to believe that the artists coming up since the 1980s have grown less likely to draw long-running manga because they aren’t on the same level as some of the huge names who have gained acclaim over the past 40 years. There’s some evidence to support the idea that contemporary mangaka show evidence of strain from the demanding schedule of weekly serialization, albeit subjective or worse, anecdotal, but there was a damning realization I had when reading Jujutsu Kaisen, realizing that the art undergoes significant change, change I saw as decline.

Understandably, when you have to draw fast and have to feed a machine that has, by now, defined its most lucrative projects to be of a certain nature, there’s a lot of pressure, but when comparing the 155th chapter of BLEACH to the 155th chapter of Jujutsu Kaisen (which are highly important to the narratives of both titles), I came to understand just how incredible the authors of the Big Three Era really were to maintain, and even improve their art over their demanding careers. Kaiju No. 8, for instance, is published on a bi-weekly basis, and maintains excellent art, but would that still be the case if it were weekly?

The Changing Landscape

Finally, and perhaps the most important element, is the fact that the media landscape at large has experienced a kind of “streamlining”. Everything has been done before, so then everything had to be subverted, but that’s been done to death too. As each era demands something “more” from its media, aspects lose their novelty, and become less accessible from an author’s perspective, as tropes, character archetypes and story beats start to feel derivative. Perhaps shorter stories are a sign of a more developed medium. Or would that only be the case if the current truly could eclipse the past?