This Week in Anime

The Cutthroat World of Shonen Jump Manga

Steve
I like the cut of your jib, Nick, so I'm gonna take that ball and run it an extra ten yards. Because you know what? Screw anime! I'm sick of talking about anime. Anime hasn't gotten us anywhere. So we should stick to a topic as semantically distal from anime as possible. And by that, I, of course, mean manga.

To paraphrase a tweet from the Atlanta rapper Young Thug: I hate when MANGA die.

It's a hot enough issue for its flames to have licked even my carefully regimented internet experience. I'm not a regular follower of WSJ series outside of the occasional exception that poisons my brain (hello Chainsaw Man), but the life cycle of a Jump series certainly seems like it's a feast or famine affair.

And because I don't have that decade of experience, I did the next best thing and looked at graphs. There's a neat website Jajanken that has cataloged data from every issue of WSJ and trended it. While the presentation isn't as robust as I'd like, and thus it's hard to do some proper numerical analysis, it's eye-opening to look through the years and realize just how many HUNDREDS of series have started and stopped throughout the magazine's half-century of history.

And there is the first detail to remember while looking at these cancellations. Weekly Shonen Jump is the vanguard of popularity in the mangasphere. It's not a scrappy up-and-coming competitor. It is the competition. It's the cutthroat apex of it.

The Hunters Guild: Red Hood is a good case study, and I'm not just saying that because it's 18 chapters long and can be finished in less than an evening. And having done just that, I can understand why it appealed to people. The dark European fairy tale vibe was nice and distinct. The enemy wolves had these great, grotesquely cartoony character designs. The art had a good command of varying line thicknesses. It starred some gigantic women. What's not to love?

That makes sense. But I can understand the other side of the equation too. After the introductory arc, the story's momentum grinds to a halt with a training arc that fails to capitulate on those earlier charms. And it also makes sense that the early stages of a WSJ manga are super sink or swim. You're probably doomed if you can't hook the right audience right away.

Ironically, my opinion of Red Hood only perked up in the final few chapters, when the author must have gotten wind that the series would be axed. It goes from paint-by-numbers shonen to a messy mélange of metatextual madness. It's not exceptionally well done or innovative—it's no Princess Tutu—but it gives me an idea of where the mangaka ultimately wanted to go with their tale. And I respect going out in that blaze of glory. When you plan on something lasting for years and don't even get half of one, your options for a conclusion are limited. And your options for a satisfying one are nonexistent. That's heartbreaking.

It's such an impossible position to be put in, though! I can't imagine the surge of emotions going through an author who had a spot on the biggest manga magazine in the world and now has to pack up their desk because they failed to tick the unknowable boxes required to make a successful series. Manga isn't science. It's an art that you pour yourself into.

For the time being, I also imagine that much of the Western fervor around beloved canceled series stems from the whole simulpub situation still being in its infancy. Like, the Shonen Jump app only just turned four years old. If Red Hood had come out a decade earlier, its popularity wouldn't have been able to spread fast enough to garner this much of a response. And a decade from now, English-speaking audiences will probably be more acclimated to these cuts as part of the typical WSJ ecosystem.

Alternatively, people on the internet have been and will always be angry about anything and everything. So.

That raises another salient point: there's no exact science to cancellations either. I've seen people try to read the table of contents like tea leaves. Sure, there are trends over large enough pools of data, but ultimately, the decision to cut or promote one series or another lies in the hands of people whose brains we don't have access to. I'd wager money is the biggest factor, though. Definitely money.

However, let's look at WSJ as an institution. You'd expect a magazine of this size to gravitate towards crowd-pleasers and thus be more conservative regarding which manga it fosters. Executives and investors will always want a safe return. This is, however, a tricky proposition when it comes to art. Art and its audience will always beg for innovation, so even a magazine like WSJ must take risks. And you see that reflected in the variety of the series it floats.

Like, it's not an underground zine being printed on demand, but it's not all Dragon Ball either.

Yeah! To prep for this column, I read (at your direction) some of these series and was genuinely taken aback by how much I enjoyed them. RuriDragon's both so chill and overtly metaphorical that you can't help but be charmed by it. Akane-banashi uses a tremendous amount of craft—the facial expressions!—to translate the appeal of rakugo onto the printed page. They're not too far off the beaten path but far enough to feel fresh in their own ways.

RuriDragon's also worth noting for being on hiatus since last August. Yet it's not canceled because the first tankobon sold like gangbusters.

It just goes to show you can't predict what will blow up. Or what won't! Ayashimon seemed like it had all the ingredients for a hit—a previously successful author, strong character designs with a yakuza backdrop, a terminally dense boy protagonist who references other WSJ manga, etc.—yet it died on the vine 25 chapters in.

After catching up with it after the fact, I felt more attached to this than to Red Hood. So whereas the latter fits the bill of an interesting curiosity, reaching the end of Ayashimon hit me with real pangs of disappointment.

Another frustrating thing about the nature of many of these cancellations is the feeling that the series never get the opportunity to develop into stronger versions of themselves. Like, there are loads of stories with rough beginnings that take a bit to get going but end up in incredible places. But in WSJ, by and large, if you don't hook 'em fast enough, it's curtains.

That is also true, but I think that shows how, even with its various genres, WSJ still selects for certain kinds of stories told in certain ways. It's not wrong for a magazine to have an individual identity. That's why so many of them publish their stuff to their own audiences. But when talking about the biggest game in town, you feel like pushing it to have an even bigger tent open to even more people.

The existence of Chainsaw Man really blows this whole discussion open. I still think about how prickly and anarchic its plotting is and how incredibly it did anyway. By the same token, though, you can look at the early stages of Dragon Ball and easily see how much Toriyama was pulling out of his ass week to week. But that didn't matter because he knew how to make it work.

And there's no one way to fail to do this either. To circle back to what instigated the most recent iteration of this ongoing discussion, we have PPPPPP, which played on for 70 chapters before being rushed into its coda.

It's made incredibly and awkwardly obvious here, too, thanks to the structure of PPPPPP. Lucky had six siblings to confront in his piano vision quest, but the series ends before he gets to the final two. So whether it's after 18, 25, or 70 chapters, ending your series prematurely seems to suck hard, no matter how much runway you've been given.

I get that, but there's also a certain je nais se quois to keeping up with a serialized series too. Even if they end early, end poorly, or go on for five years too long. The journey is always there, and the nice thing about the increased availability of WSJ in Western circles is that it's easier than ever to find people to share that journey. And to commiserate with. Oh, the commiseration.

It hurts to see a series you like get escorted to the manga gallows, but I hope people can learn to take it in stride as an inevitable risk that authors and audiences alike have to assume. That's the nature of both art as business and art as art. Do you know how many webcomics I loved that just petered out because the authors got bored with them or got real jobs? I'm sure some prehistoric humans became inconsolable after their tribe's storyteller got eaten by a sabertooth right before they got to the climax. That's a pain we've always walked with—no need to go all Pepe Silvia every time.

Okay, I'll do that while I wait for the second season of The Flowers of Evil anime. Any day now :')