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 one title 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, Brian checks in with “Sho-Ha Shoten!.” If you have thoughts on this or any other current Shonen Jump titles, please let us know in the comments!
Sho-Ha Shoten! Chapter 22
Written by Akinari Asakura
Illustrated by Takeshi Obata
Lettered by James Gaubatz
Translated by Stephen Paul
Reviewed by Brian Salvatore
In discussing “Sho-Ha Shoten!” before, the structure often is a talking point. Because of the way that the book is built, there are very clear chapters that feel more essential than others, namely the ones that are built around One Way Ticket to the Top. This chapter begins the grand finals arc in earnest, with Broken Glass Slipper, the first team out of the chute, getting both an origin story and a peek at their comedy.
While theoretically, this is a good way to make the competition feel more intense, because there are ten teams in this competition and this story comes out monthly, it means that it will almost be a year before we see OWTTT’s performance if the structure follows a similar path. Now, it may not dedicate a chapter to each group, perhaps just the ones who haven’t had spotlight issues/segments beforehand, but this is still a lot of time to give to a crew that we, as readers, are designed to root against, or at least to be the secondary rooting interests. With this getting repeated so many times, it’s going to be a slog before the end of the finals.
However, this is one of the best chapters, art-wise, that we’ve seen from Takeshi Obata. Obata has found a system for doing these competition issues, where there are sprinklings of not-quite infographics, but detailed looks at theories and approaches within the competitions. Couple this with the flashbacks and the various layouts that get introduced when the story isn’t being told in a real-time, linear way, and each page looks different than the one before in ways that really build up the visual language of the title.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that Akinari Asakura’s desire to fill out the other teams’ personalities and backstories is a good one, but spending 50 pages on each team is going to get tiresome quickly if there isn’t a way to include Azemichi and Taiyo more in the interstitial moments, and not just them reacting to their comedy. It’s a tough line to walk between creating a world that feels fully lived in and full of three-dimensional characters and one that feels overstuffed and oversaturated. So far, “Sho-Ha Shoten!” has walked that line, but it feels like, with each passing side tale, it is getting blurred.
Final Verdict: 6.6 – A strong side-story, but one that is already feeling indomitable.
