Shonen Jump 090119 Columns 

This Week in Shonen Jump: 2019 in Shonen Jump

By | January 1st, 2020
Posted in Columns | % Comments

Welcome to This Week in Shonen Jump, our weekly check in on Viz’s various Shonen Jump series. Viz has recently changed their release format, but our format will mostly remain the same. We will still review the newest chapters of two titles a week, now with even more options at our disposal. The big change for our readers is that, even without a Shonen Jump subscription, you can read these most recent chapters for free at Viz.com or using their app.

This week, Robbie, Vince, and Zach all shared their reflections on 2019 in Shonen Jump. See ya next week!

While I gushed over the value and selection of titles in Shonen Jump for my Year-in-Review: Best Anthology piece, my year with Shonen Jump has been fairly mixed. For the first time in several years I found myself gradually losing interest in longer running series like “Promised Neverland,” “My Hero Academia,” and “Black Clover.” Many of my favorite titles, like “Dragon Ball Super,” “Boruto,” and “One-Punch Man” release monthly, meaning I rarely felt the urge to check the app when new titles were added. The influx of new additions to Shonen Jump was frequent this year. However, only a few titles managed to truly grab and keep my attention, such as the fantastic “Mitama Security: Spirit Buster.”

Quite often, I found myself disappointed with Shonen Jump’s output. High profile endings (“Food Wars”) and beginnings (“Samurai 8”) came and went with little excitement or fanfare. I have considered contributing my general apathy to the move from a digital magazine format to the current digital catalogue. This has certainly changed my reading habits; I would rather go back and binge “One Piece” or “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” over many of the current ongoing series.

I don’t want to be completely “gloom and doom” regarding Shonen Jump. All of the praise that I heaped onto the service in my Year-in-Review piece still stands. I’ll chalk this up to being an off-year, as I go into 2020 with hopes and dreams of reading all of “One Piece” and catching up on several series that I’ve let fall to the wayside. – Zach Wilkerson

There are a few long-running serial manga that I hold dear and will always check in on (“One Piece”, “One Punch Man”, the recently departed “Food Wars”), but I’m always searching for that next fix. Each new Shonen Jump series brings with it the promise that this just might be the next one I stick with for the long haul. There are a lot of false starts and a lot of series that clearly aren’t long for this world even from the very first chapter, but there was one new series that I could see myself falling in love with immediately: “Zipman!!”

It balances wide-screen storytelling with a kind of homespun charm. Kaname’s (the main character) old-fashioned zippered mech suit is one of the best comic costume designs of the year, from any publisher, from any country. It uses a good-natured, yet somewhat tragicomic protagonist to imply a kind of nostalgic attachment to the tokusatsu shows of Japanese media history. The whole recipe works. The emotional beats land, the sense of nostalgia is esoteric and engaging, and the humor is delightful. All-in-all, Chapter 1 of “Zipman!!” grabbed me as hard and as quickly as any series in recent memory. – Vince Ostrowski

Shonen Jump this year had quite the blend of content. We can choose from revivals of old classics like “Dragon Ball Super,” popular ongoings like “One Piece” and “My Hero Academia,” newer series going strong like “Samurai 8,” and series that didn’t quite last, like “Double Taisei” and “Yui Kamio Lets Loose.” Did any of them make such an impact on me that they stand out as my favorite of the year?

Yes, and the answer might not surprise you.

If you’ve read Multiversity’s top translated work, you already saw my high praise for “Doctor Stone,” but I’ll reiterate that here. In 2019, “Doctor Stone” expanded its world in so many ways. In addition to the anime introducing people to the series, the manga itself brought in more characters, took off in a new arc where they begin traveling the world and uncovering the secrets of petrification, and even managed to bring in some great action to a manga about science while maintaining its wit and cleverness.

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Riichiro Inagaki’s story has continued to take off in new and exciting directions. We’ve met new additions to the main cast and a new group of antagonists (who will undoubtedly eventually join the Kingdom of Science, but not yet) and every character introduced has a unique personality and style to them. This is backed up by Boichi’s fantastic artwork, combining highly detailed shading and distinct designs while still being unafraid to go into the humorously exaggerated whenever the moment calls for it. Most recently, we got an intense battle between Hyoga and Moz, where Boichi’s style got utilized in beautiful combat scenes. Even then, Riichiro Inagaki keeps the story smart, showing everyone’s strategies and tactics that make a difference more than brute strength.

Every chapter has been engaging, exciting, and takes off in new directions. From building a ship and radio to infiltrating a harem, not a single chapter of “Doctor Stone” has been a letdown yet.

When picking a favorite series, we can spend all day analyzing and comparing artwork, story progression, and so forth. But when you ask yourself “What manga am I the most excited to see updated each week?” and one name stands out, that’s it. That’s “Doctor Stone.” – Robbie Pleasant


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