But, really, when all is said & done, one question will remain: "Why go through all of this, and why come back to it twice?"
Because I have always felt that history matters just as much when it comes to entertainment as it does to real life events... and not enough of it is easily available in English when it comes to a subject like manga, even for a topic as popular as Shonen Jump. Over in Japan you can find both manga & even written memoirs from the people who lived through it all, whether it was Shinji Hiramatsu going from assistant to his serialized debut in the 70s, Koji Maki having to deal with cancellation in the 80s, 3rd Editor-in-Chief Shigeo Nishimura recalling his time with Jump from his perspective, or 4th EiC Hiroki Goto looking back on some of the Golden Age's most iconic works. Some of these were even published by Shueisha, but you know Viz more than likely wouldn't be interested in any of this stuff, simply because, for most manga fans, it's history & that isn't what they're interesting in reading about; that's not a slight towards most manga readers or Viz, by the way, but it is a simple fact. I did the original Ages of Jump in 2016 simply because I wanted to (even if only for my own curiosity), I did the Ages of Jump Redux in 2018 because I wanted to do it again for Jump's 50th Anniversary, and the same is true of the Ages of Jump Encore in 2023 for Jump's 55th. If others out there found something cool to learn from all of this, then I am sincerely grateful for that, because it does give the feeling, even if only fleeting, that it did matter. Thank you to anyone who came across this series, & thank you to everyone who felt that it was worth sharing, even if most of it does come off as rather "Wall of Text"-like; that's just how it came out in 2016, & I'm trying to keep consistency across this entire series.
And with that out of the way, let's bring it all to an end with a coda as we re-enter the Golden Age's second half.
Haruto Umezawa got his start in manga at the age of 22 by working as an assistant, alongside Takehiko Inoue, to Tsukasa Hojo for City Hunter. Interestingly enough, Umezawa would later find a photograph of Shinjuku that Hojo & his staff took three years prior for reference, one that Umezawa himself was on, front & center; Umezawa later admitted that it must have been fate. He'd eventually make his own serialized debut, under the pen name Masato Umezawa, with mid-1990s Sakenomi Doji (though I've also seen it as Shuten Doji), which only lasted 15 chapters before getting cancelled. Afterwards, Umezawa returned to one-shots, one of which appearing in the 1991 Shonen Jump Summer Special & gaining some traction. This resulted in the serialized debut of Hareluya in mid-1992, which told the story of the eponymous son of Harebare, God of the 20th Century. With the new millennium only years away, Harebare is worried that his son, who cares not for humanity & would rather just hang out with female angels, won't be properly ready to take his place as God of the 21st Century, so Harebare casts Hareluya down to Earth to live a human, in the hopes that it will teach him humility. A now-human Hareluya quickly gets taken in by Sister Chris, a local nun, who enrolls him at her alma mater, Rakuen High School. While Umezawa initially went with a "fish out of holy water" concept, showing Hareluya deal with human problems in a cocky fashion (despite him no longer being godlike), he eventually switched over to it being more of a traditional delinquent series, with Hareluya (accidentally) finding himself friends via some classmates & getting into more traditional teenager problems, like dealing with a part-time job & fighting against a drug dealer. Unfortunately, the series quickly lost interest with readers, before ending after only 10 chapters & one volume... at least, on the surface.
Turns out, Hareluya actually did start finding more reader interest once Umezawa more or less ignored Hareluya himself being the literal Son of God & instead treated it as more of a normal delinquent manga. So, from what I can reason out, Umezawa & the Jump editorial staff seemingly decided that, instead of having the "Son of God" aspect linger over the series for the long run (& potentially create storyline problems down the line), it'd simply be better for Umezawa to end Hareluya & just reboot it without any of the heavenly connections. Eight issues after Hareluya's final chapter ran, Jump would publish a one-shot titled Hareluya II BØY, and another seven issues after that BØY (as it'd simply be officially known as in Japan) would properly debut as a new serialization in late 1992, one that Umezawa would do until early 1999 & last 33 volumes; to this day, BØY is Haruto Umezawa's longest & most successful work. I covered BØY as part of the original Ages of Jump, but it is worth noting that the TV anime adaptation of Hareluya II BØY in 1997 (which is officially known by the full title in Japan) did include some shout-outs to the original Hareluya, with the final episode even having some fun by adapting part of the first chapter, though with notably different context. In the end, Hareluya is an interesting example of a mangaka creating something good, but needing to be given a second chance to refine it & remove what didn't work out the first time around; a rarity in Jump's history.
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Up next is the last series that went over 100 chapters that I had yet to cover from anything pre-Iron Age but, ironically enough, that is actually perfectly fitting for this very manga! Eventually, it became standard practice for Jump editorial to put manga that was underperforming closer to the end of each issue, and during the 80s it became standard practice for most manga's final chapter to close out its respective issue. Possibly realizing that readers were catching on to this, Jump decided to start putting certain series at the end on purpose, if only to help encourage readers to actually read the entire magazine every week, since now they'd have a consistent presence to look forward to at the end. A good example of that was early 1991's Outer Zone, the Twilight Zone-esque episodic series that wound up being a consistent presence at the end (or at least near end) of most issues it appeared in from 1992 to its end in mid-1994. Two issues after Outer Zone's finale, a successor to the "end of issue" concept would come about, though now the genre was completely different. Mid-1994's Ou-sama wa Roba ~Hattari Teikoku no Gyakushu~/The King is a Donkey ~The Bluff Empire's Counterattack~ by Kokichi Naniwa was a gag manga in which each chapter told its own story, usually within just seven pages, after initially being just a single page long; in fact, the debut issue for this series featured three chapters simultaneously, because of how short they were. Over time, though, the stories would tend to fit within one of nine different "series": ○○ra, early single-page stories about rampaging animals; Group○○, stories about fairy tales & legends (like Momotaro & Mito Komon); Japan Sinks a Little, a parody of Sakyo Komatsu's 1973 novel Japan Sinks; Team Gymnastics Series, where men create different images using gymnastics formations; The Tale of Mariko & the Wind, which told the "little love story" of Mariko & Takayo-kun (this was Naniwa's sly way of doing two series in Jump simultaneously); Nakaide, in which the titular lead forces their friend Kaneko on various adventures; Proposal Series, where Naniwa comes up with various new inventions, only for the editors to tell him that each one already exists; Tag Series, where a girl & her family (who have all become demons, as a pun on the word "Onigokko/Tag") play a game of tag all around Japan; & Matchmaking Series, which sounds self-explanatory enough. Naniwa initially got into a little bit of trouble by apparently featuring some inappropriate expressions in the very first chapter (which has never been included in any of the compiled releases), but that didn't stop him from doing the series until the end of 1996 for 129 chapters, across seven volumes, with all but seven of the chapters appearing near or at the end of their respective issues of Shonen Jump.
The concept of an "end of issue" gag manga would go on to be repeated with both Pyu to Fuku! Jaguar in the 00s & Isobe Isobee Monogatari (eventually) in the 2010s, making Ou-sama wa Roba a successful trendsetter. As for Kokichi Naniwa, he's still doing gag manga to this day, though he's stuck more to one-shots than serializations, and when he did a shojo series for Ribon magazine in 2007 he actually initially used a pen name, only for him to revert back to his actual name once he was found out.
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Back in The Ages of Jump Redux I covered the second serialization by Hajime Kazu, 1997's Meiryoutei Gotou Seijurou, mainly because it was easily her longest work in Jump (or, specifically, Weekly Jump), running for (at the very least) 3.3x as long as anything else she made for the magazine. However, aside from her later Luck Stealer (which was initially a one-shot in 2004, before getting expanded into a monthly serialization when Jump Square debuted in 2007), Hajime Kazu tends to be known much more for her original serialization, late 1994's Mind Assassin, so we should definitely go over that one, as well. First appearing as a one-shot in the 1994 Spring Special (& then getting reprinted in the same issue that Yu Yu Hakusho ended in), the manga follows Kazui Okumori, a slightly effeminate doctor who runs his own private practice &, despite his penchant for coming off a bit dumb & inattentive of his surroundings, is intensively observant of his patients & their concerns. However, Kazui's true abilities come from the fact that he's a "Mind Assassin", a type of psychic originally "created" by the Nazis during World War II who has the power to destroy another person's memories or even mind simply via touch; Kazui himself is the grandson of Kraus Kroller, the very first Mind Assassin. However, Kazui has no interest in using his powers to hurt people, instead using it to relive his patients of their suffering, & only as a last resort. That being said, though, should said suffering be from the actions of someone else, then Kazui will deal with the perpetrator himself, donning black gloves & turning into the assassin that his powers were meant to be used for. As you can tell, Mind Assassin really wasn't much like anything you'd normally see in Jump even from a basic conceptual sense, especially during the late Golden Age, and while it seemingly did OK early on, it eventually lost readers' interest before getting cancelled in mid-1995 after 28 chapters (including the original one-shot). However, Hajime Kazu was still allowed to continue making the manga, though she never actually "finished" it, resulting in another seven chapters being serialized in the 1995 Summer Special, 1996 Spring Special, & also some issues of Monthly Shonen Jump between 1995 & 1996, with the entire manga totaling five volumes, in the end. Not just that, but Mind Assassin would even receive a trio of novels & a trio of drama CDs between 1995 & 1999, with Hikaru Midorikawa voicing Kazui in the latter!
Without a doubt, Mind Assassin is a perfect example of how a series could look like an abject failure on the surface, only for one to realize just how successful it actually wound up being, in reality, when you dig deeper, and it's now easy to see why Hajime Kazu chose to celebrate Jump's 50th Anniversary in 2018 by doing a drawing of Kazui Okumori, instead of Seijurou Gotou. As for Kazu herself, she's pretty much retired from manga after finishing up Luck Stealer in 2012, despite announcing in 2018 that she had plans to make a new manga for Shonen Jump+, which still has yet to happen.
Without a doubt, Tetsuo Hara is one of the most iconic mangaka of all time, with his most notable & influential work being Fist of the North Star, the series that started the Golden Age of Jump. However, it is worth nothing that Hara is known for being an artist that seemingly works best with a writer telling the actual story, and when it comes to Shonen Jump there are literally only two series Hara ever was the artist AND storywriter for (not counting one-shots he made): His first series & his last series. His first, late 1982's Tetsu no Don Quixote, was brought to a sudden end by editor Nobuhiko Horie (later Jump's 5th EiC, 1993 to 1996) after only 10 chapters due to it just not cutting the mustard. Hara's last series for Weekly Shonen Jump, though, is worth going over because it does feel like a case where Hara (& possibly Horie, too) didn't seem to learn from something similar that had happened a decade prior with another successful Jump mangaka. Debuting in mid-1995, Takeki Ryusei/Ryusei the Ferocious told the story of Ryusei Kato, a charismatic & strong 16-year old who wound up becoming the leader of Kanto's strongest motorcycle gang, but winds up leaving Japan to get a cure for his ill sister. Two years later, Ryusei returns & finds his gang now under the thumb of the local yakuza, and he fights to put an end to all of that. Despite not really resembling it from a direct story perspective, Tetsuo Hara eventually outright admitted that Takeki Ryusei was created as a "remake" (his own words) of Hiroshi Motomiya's Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho, Jump's original hit manga from 1968. Unfortunately, it was close to 30 years since that series had debuted, and despite Hara giving his "remake" its own style (with guns... and maybe hookers?) it wound up only lasting 26 chapters, across three volumes, before getting cancelled in late 1995. What's most surprising, though, is that Hara even tried doing a Gaki Daisho homage manga in the first place, because it was already proven that such a concept wasn't going to succeed back in the 80s. As covered previously in the Redux, Masami Kurumada pulled the same exact thing with 1984's Otoko Zaka, which wound up getting cancelled after 30 chapters (though still three volumes) & showed just how much things had changed after only 16 years, so what chance did Tetsuo Hara really have another decade later?
As mentioned, Takeki Ryusei would be Hara's final series for Weekly Jump, as he would do a one-shot in 1996, before moving over to Monthly Jump for his final manga under the Jump banner, 1997's Sakon -Sengoku Fu'unroku-. After ending Sakon in mid-2000, Hara would co-found production company Coamix alongside Nobuhiko Horie, Tsukasa Hojo, Ryuji Tsugihara (Yoroshiku Mecha-Doc), & voice actor Akira Kamiya, and it's through Coamix (& its publishing partners) that Hara's continued to make manga to this very day (despite his slowly failing eyesight), though they're mostly related to prior-gen Fist of the North Star prequel Fist of the Blue Sky & spin-offs of Hana no Keiji. Aside from re-releasing it as a single omnibus in 2008, Tetsuo Hara has never returned to Takeki Ryusei, unlike how Masami Kurumada eventually returned to Otoko Zaka in 2014.
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After failing his college entrance exam three times Yasuaki Kita decided to become a mangaka, and after getting some one-shots published he made his serialized debut with early 1996's Makuhari, seemingly named after the community located within Chiba, his hometown. The manga followed the school life of Tetsuhiro Shiota & Shigeo Nara, two friends who reluctantly join Makuhari Minami High's baseball club because "Jump already has Slam Dunk" & they "didn't want to join the Sexy Commando club". Yeah, I think it's pretty easy to see what Kita was going for with Makuhari, and that was essentially to just crap on anything else running in Shonen Jump at the time, and though the baseball club did occasionally try to recruit more members, nothing about the manga actually revolved around baseball. Instead, Kita poked fun at titles like Slam Dunk, Rurouni Kenshin, Sakigake!! Otoko Juku, Midori no Makibao, & JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, sarcastically talked about the private lives of Jump's various editors (including his own, Yoshihisa Heishi, who'd later be Jump's 10th EiC, 2011 to 2017, & is now Company Director at Shueisha!) by mixing in lies, and (for whatever reason) constantly belittled fellow mangaka Kaoru Tsukishima, who was drawing mid-1996's Profiler Kusanagi Aoi at the time; in turn, Tsukishima would feature Kita as a murder victim in their manga. That's not to say that there was no plot to Makuhari, but it's easy to see that the manga was really more Kita's way of embracing his penchant for dirty humor, bizarre gags, and scathing parody. While that managed to actually make Makuhari somewhat successful in the latter half of 1996, it wasn't enough to keep it popular, and eventually would end in late 1997 after 82 chapters, across nine volumes. In true Kita fashion, he would sarcastically say that if he hadn't "given up" (because he had no final punch line in mind & "couldn't let the poop flow"), then it would have been Yu-Gi-Oh! that got cancelled instead, as that series would move over to focusing on the card game aspect (&, in turn, become a massive success) just a couple issues after Makuhari ended; Yoshihisa Heishi was editor for both series. Not just that, but the final author's note he gave for the issue of Jump that featured Makuhari's finale simply read "I'm free!!!!!!!!", showing just how tired Kita was of the Jump system.
However, Makuhari's true legacy comes in the final page of the series, which brought a real life spat between mangaka into play. Over the course of Makuhari's run, issues of Jump would start seeing Yasuaki Kita get into verbal arguments with Tottemo! Luckyman's Hiroshi Gamou via the author's notes section that appeared at the start of each issue. The snide remarks between each side got so bad that Kita decided to reveal on the last page of Makuhari's final chapter that the real main character of the manga was, & had always been... Hiroshi Gamou! This contentious relationship was also previously seen on the cover of combined Issue #5-6 for 1997, which was the last cover that gathered all of the then-running authors together for a group shot, as while everyone else was staring at the camera, Kita was just eyeing daggers at Gamou, and it's visibly obvious that Gamou knew that. Two years later, Kita's exclusivity deal with Shueisha ended & he moved over to Kodansha, where he's stayed to this very day, eventually finding success with his Weekly Young Magazine series Kenka Shobai & sequel Kenka Kagyo, which he's been doing since 2005 & currently totals 37 volumes across both titles. In almost fitting fashion, when Shueisha eventually re-released Makuhari in the 00s they wound up having to promote rival Kodansha in the books due to Kita's deal with that publisher.
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When I did the Redux I felt that there was only one series from the Dark/Heroic Age of Jump that I felt was truly "missing" from the original Ages of Jump, but this time around I still felt that we should have something from those scant few years during the second half of the 90s. Therefore, I went with the debut serialization of a mangaka who has since become a big favorite for many, but has since ended his association with Shueisha & Jump: Hiroyuki Takei. After first doing artwork for a manga made for a fanzine, Takei would find himself as an assistant for the likes of Charlie Nozawa & Koji Kiriyama, managing to get his first one-shot published in 1994, before becoming a member of the "Watsuki-gumi", the legendary group of assistants Nobuhiro Watsuki had for Rurouni Kenshin that included the likes of Eiichiro Oda & Shin'ya Suzuki. He later published two more one-shots in 1996 via Jump's Seasonal Specials, the last of which would then get expanded into his first serialization, early 1997's Butsu Zone. Pulling from Takei's love of Bhuddist mythology, the series stars a Bhodisattva named Senju, specifically the Thousand-Hand Avalokiteśvara. Senju was sent to Earth to protect a girl named Sachi Saigan, who's the reincarnation of the Buddha Miroku, & guide her to India so that she can achieve enlightenment, all while forces called Mara & even rival Buddha aim to either stop them or (for the latter) replace Senju as Sachi's protector. With a intriguing premise & unique aesthetic, Butsu Zone actually started off doing rather decent, and unlike most new series of its ilk didn't suffer an instant drop in magazine placement. Rather, Butsu Zone slowly crept its way down the ranks, as it were, almost as if Jump's editorial staff were hoping it'd recover, but eventually it was forced to come to an early end in mid-1997, after only 19 chapters; to help pad it out to three volumes, Takei's original three one-shots were included across the books. However, after Hiroyuki Takei found success with Shaman King, Butsu Zone still managed to get adapted into a trio of drama CDs between 2003 & 2004, Senju was a playable character in Shaman King: Funbari Spirits for the PS2, and there's even word of an anime pilot being screened at Jump Festa once, though it's never been proven to actually exist. Also, while the series itself failed, Takei would repurpose a number of the cast for Shaman King (& the Super Star sequel), where they formed the group Gandhara, a nonviolent Buddhist team in the Shaman Fight, with Sachi & Senju being the basis for leader Sati Saigan & her guardian Dainichi Nyorai, respectively.
Hiroyuki Takei once admitted that he was a fan of both JoJo's Bizarre Adventure & its precursor Baoh the Visitor, and ironically enough he wound up having his own equivalent to those with Shaman King & Butsu Zone. As of mid-2023, Kodansha has yet to re-release Butsu Zone following Hiroyuki Takei's departure from Shueisha in 2017, but hopefully one day it will be given a new chance to find new fans. With this we say "Farewell" to the Golden & Dark/Heroic Ages of Jump, so let's head towards the finale!
We move into the Silver Age of Jump to finish things off, and we start with the final series Hirohiko Araki ever made for Shonen Jump... sort of. The original Ages of Jump covered JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, a series that Araki was able to continually make from 1987 to 1999 by way of dividing things up across multiple "Parts", each of which told their own story but still were connected by way of a shared bloodline for the main character of each Part. We also already covered 2000's JoJo Part 6: Stone Ocean, which was initially meant to be a soft reboot for the series so as to welcome in newcomers, but over time still wound up being very much connected to what came before. However, Araki also made sure to give Stone Ocean an ending in 2003 that very much felt like a definitive conclusion to everything that had come before, so what would his next manga be about? The answer to that would be early 2004's Steel Ball Run, which told the story of a cross-country horse race held in the United States in 1890, the titular Steel Ball Run, with a $50 million grand prize at stake; that'd be ~$1.676 billion today. In particular, the manga followed Gyro Zeppeli, a mysterious man who can wield steel balls using a power called "The Spin", & Johnny Joestar, a lower half paraplegic who enters the race to follow Gyro, as touching his steel balls (...I'm not going there) let him move his legs for a short time. SBR's serialization in Jump was a unique one, as each chapter was actually around 31 pages long, instead of the standard 20 or so, & it took 2-3 month breaks after every 10 or 11 chapters. After the second break, though, SBR would only run for another two chapters before it was decided that it'd leave Shonen Jump entirely & get moved over to seinen magazine Ultra Jump in late 2004; the Shonen Jump run lasted 23 chapters. It was also revealed at this point that Steel Ball Run was actually Part 7 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, taking place in an alternate universe, & the iconic Stands would also get fully reintroduced around this point, as well; it's often forgotten now that SBR wasn't officially a JoJo series at first. The UJ run would eventually reveal the main plot being about Gyro & Johnny needing to prevent Funny Valentine, the President of the United States of America, from getting access to all of the various body parts of (heavily implied to be) Jesus Christ, as it would give him absolute power; yep, that's a completely normal storyline for JoJo. Araki had numerous reasons for the move, with probably the biggest one being that it allowed him more freedom to explore more sensitive & adult subject matter, but in the end Steel Ball Run would continue in Ultra Jump until early 2011, totaling 24 volumes, the first four of which containing the initial Shonen Jump run. Due to it being Part 7 of JoJo, Volume 20 of SBR would also be the 100th cumulative volume of the entire series.
Following Steel Ball Run, Hirohiko Araki has continued to make more JoJo manga in the pages of Ultra Jump, namely Part 8: JoJolion & the recently-debuted Part 9: The JoJoLands, though all collected volumes continue to use the "Jump Comics" label reserved for Shonen Jump manga, even though JoJolion & The JoJoLands have never appeared in that magazine, showing just how ingrained JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is with the brand.
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Similar to Blue City last time, this is another series that was mentioned in some of the comments back in the day, and after looking it up I felt that it definitely had an interesting story behind it that made it worth including here, despite (or, perhaps, because of) being cancelled... twice. Born in 1980, Yujiro Sakamoto would get his first published manga one-shot in 2001, and he'd stick with that before finally getting the chance to make a serialized manga. The end result of that was mid-2005's Takaya -Senbu Gakuen Gekitoden-/Takaya -The Tale of Fierce Fights at Senbu Academy-, a series about Takaya Homura, a 15-year old high school "ronin" whose parents have gone bankrupt recently. However, the Homura Family receives a 10 billion yen donation by the Shirakawa Family, who live next door, under the agreement that Takaya enrolls at Senbu Private Academy, a school where only the strong survive & the weak are kicked out. Takaya's parents agree to the deal without their son's permission, resulting in Takaya enrolling in the school that the Shirakawa siblings, Nagisa & Sho, attend. It's often been stated online that Takaya more or less bombed in Shonen Jump, resulting in it being cancelled in early 2006 after 35 chapters, but if you go to that link & look at Jajanken's Table of Contents "rank" chart, you'd see that it averaged 11.61, or roughly in the middle of the magazine at that time. Sure, it did creep downwards slowly, but it really wasn't all the much different from much more successful series like D.Gray-man or Sket Dance, and it even "outperformed" the likes of Mr. Fullswing, Buso Renkin, To-Love-Ru, Psyren, Black Cat, Neuro: Supernatural Detective, & Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan! Still, for whatever reason, Yujiro Sakamoto seemingly saw the writing on the wall that Takaya was on the verge of cancellation, so he did something drastic: He completely changed what kind of manga it was!
On the very same issue that saw the last chapter of Takaya -Senbu Gakuen Gekitoden-, immediately after that finale was the prologue chapter of early 2006's Takaya -Yoake no Enjin-Ou-/Takaya -The Burning Blade King of the Dawn-, a sequel series in which, following the events of the first series, Nagisa goes missing & Takaya winds up being transported to a fantasy world in search of her. Yes, Takaya literally went from a combat school series to an isekai, complete with Takaya's own skills & abilities being useless, resulting in him needing to learn new skills with a sword. However, where the first Takaya manga wound up being "middle of the magazine" fodder, the second Takaya manga wound up being where it truly bottomed out. By the very nature of how it debuted, as in "it literally appeared directly after the first series' final chapter in the same issue", Takaya -Yoake no Enjin-Ou-'s entire existence was near the end of each issue of Shonen Jump, and after just 13 chapters (including the prologue) was effectively mercy killed in mid-2006. Infamously, the final pages literally showed Takaya & Nagisa about the hit the main villain with a double team attack, while the bottom of the two-page splash literally stated "ALRIIIIIIIIIGHT, THE END!!"; it'd even get referenced in 2013's Nyarko-chan: Another Crawling Chaos. To this day, Takaya's second run is actually the lowest average "rank" any manga has ever had in Jump history, at 18.77. Technically, Ou-sama wa Roba & Pyu to Fuku! Jaguar do rank lower, on average, but those were meant to end issues of Jump on purpose, so they're excluded, while Takaya didn't aim to do that. Overall, the first Takaya series totaled five volumes, while the second was only one. As for Yujiro Sakamoto, he'd start using the pen name Tsugiro Sakamoto for the 2011 manga adaptation of light novel Campione!, gave it another go at Jump with 2012's Koisome Momiji alongside former assistant Tadahiro Miura (which didn't last long, either, though Miura would later find success with Yuuna & the Haunted Hot Springs), and then returned to his proper name for 2020's Shadow Newt: Saisei Noryoku de Mezasu S-kyu Saikyo!, which he did alongside Yoshifumi Otera for Cygames' Cycomics line. In the end, Takaya is a truly interesting look at Jump's notoriously strict ranking system, & how one mangaka tried doing something wild in an attempt to fight against it, only to fail.
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In the original Ages of Jump I covered both Rokudenashi Blues & Rookies, the first two serializations by Masanori Morita, a man who's currently only on his fourth serialized manga after 35 years of being a mangaka. However, his third series, despite mainly being serialized as a seinen series, did originally start off in the pages of Shonen Jump, so just as with Araki let's cover Morita's farewell to the magazine. After ending Rookies in mid-2003, Morita took a two-year break from serialized manga, only making a one-shot called Shiba Inu in 2004. It was that one-shot that he'd then expand upon for his next series, late 2005's Beshari-Gurashi/A Stepped On Way of Living, which followed the exploits of Keisuke Agatsuma & Jun Tsujimoto, two high school students who wish to become comedians, so they form a duo called Kisoba AT; eventually, they're joined by Souta Koyasu & form the trio Beshari-Gurashi. Inspired by his love of comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto, Morita went as far as enrolling in Yoshimoto New Star Creation, the same actual comedy school that Matsumoto learned from in the 80s, & even graduated from its Tokyo campus in 2004, showing just how seriously he took the subject matter & how accurate he wanted his portrayal of life as a comedian to be in the manga. Unfortunately, time was slowly catching up with Morita, resulting in him only being able to consistently make Beshari-Gurashi on a weekly basis for a handful of chapters, and he'd quickly take a couple of issues off after every few chapters due to his health. After 28 chapters, Morita had no choice but to leave Shonen Jump in mid-2006, as he wanted to continue making the manga at his own pace, and following Chapter 29 appearing in the Summer 2006 issue of Akamaru Jump Beshari-Gurashi was moved to Weekly Young Jump in early 2007, ending a 17-year run with Shonen Jump. Even at Young Jump, though, Morita would serialize Beshari-Gurashi under a "two weeks on, two weeks off" pace, eventually ending the series in mid-2015 after 19 volumes, though he would return in mid-2019 for a bonus mini-story, resulting in a final total of 20 volumes, with the first three containing the initial Shonen Jump run. Similar to Morita's previous two series, Beshari-Gurashi would receive a live-action J-Drama adaptation in mid-2019, though it was apparently neither as universally beloved as Rookies', nor as controversially received as Rokudenashi Blues'.
Eventually, Masanori Morita returned once again to serialized manga, debuting suspense horror series Zashisu in Grand Jump in late 2022, which he's still doing as of this piece. Similarly, Shonen Jump would receive another manga about becoming a comedian, late 2021's Show-ha Shoten!, so even though Beshari-Gurashi unfortunately wasn't able to continue running in the magazine, it's at least seen a spiritual successor, one drawn by fellow outstanding artist Takeshi Obata, no less!
We return to Hiroyuki Takei now, with what would wind up being the last manga he ever made for Weekly Shonen Jump, but unlike with Araki & Morita, this series wouldn't simply get moved over to another magazine... kind of. Following the sudden cancellation of Shaman King in mid-2004, caused partially by his own lessening interest in making a battle manga, Takei took a bit of a break from manga in general, only helping supervise the unfinished short series Smash Bomber!, drawn by one of his assistants & based on a toy by Takara Tomy, for V Jump in 2006. However, he'd return properly in early 2007 with Jyuki Ningen Jumbor/Heavy Machinery Human Jumbor (the J is treated like a Y here, so it's technically pronounced "Yumbor"), a.k.a. Jumbor Barutronica. Taking place in the year 3002 in World Zand, which had previously been devastated by a cataclysmic disaster, the manga starred Baru Crow, the head of a construction company working for the Dorvok Empire who gets killed by a rival company headed up by Genber Diode, King of the Genber Empire. Five years later, Baru is revived in a enhanced clone body, but since it wasn't given any accelerated aging, the now Jumbor Baru is in the body of a five year old. With the Dorvok Empire now gone, Baru leads a group to fight against Genber (& the prior 11 Jumbors that predate him) in order to restore the Dorvok Empire. Yes, this does sound rather similar in a lot of ways to Mega Man, doesn't it? Anyway, Jumbor Barutronica wouldn't survive long in Shonen Jump at all, getting cancelled after only 10 chapters in early 2007, totaling just a single volume. As mentioned, this would be the last manga Takei would ever make for Weekly Jump, though later that same year at Jump Festa it was announced that Takei would be able to properly finish Shaman King via its kanzeban re-release. Later, Takei would make a one-shot in 2008 in a partnership with the late Stan Lee that lead to the serialization of Karakuri Doji Ultimo, which ran in Jump Square from 2009 to 2015 for 12 volumes. Also in 2009 was a new Jumbor one-shot in Ultra Jump co-created with writer Hiromasa Mikami, followed by a second in 2010, which were then included with the original series when that got re-released across two books in 2010. This then resulted in Takei rebooting the entire thing with mid-2010's Jumbor in Ultra Jump, which used the same basic concept as the Shonen Jump original but told a completely different story of Baru fighting against Genber; Mikami would eventually rejoin Takei later in this reboot's run. Unfortunately, after eight volumes worth of content, Jumbor went on indefinite hiatus in 2014, similar to how next-gen Shaman King sequel Shaman King Flowers ended early in Jump X that same year.
After finishing Ultimo in 2015, Takei then moved over to Kodansha for his next series, Nekogahara, and in 2017 it was revealed that Takei outright moved the copyright for Shaman King & its related works from Shueisha to Kodansha, ending his working relationship with the publisher he made his name with. Because of this, Jump has effectively ignored Hiroyuki Takei & his contributions to the magazine ever since, not even being acknowledged for Jump's 50th Anniversary in 2018 in any way. Without a doubt, the relationship between Takei & Jump had been a strained one for a good while, dating all the way back to Shaman King's original cancellation (remember, Shueisha had asked for fans to show demand before even releasing the final original tankouban!), and while the Shaman King series has since found new life via Kodansha, who knows what the future holds for something like Jumbor.
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Man, after a stretch of manga that either got cancelled or simply left Shonen Jump early on, it's actually kind of weird to have some relatively "normal" entries to cover, isn't it? Up next is a trio of series that, while not exactly becoming massively long runners, at least all made it past an entire year of serialization in Shonen Jump, the first time we've had that this time around since Makuhari, a.k.a. 13 years ago, chronologically! Born in December 1987, Sho Aimoto is a seemingly self-taught mangaka who first made her mark by winning the 33rd Jump 12 Newcomer Manga Award in 2005 with her one-shot Hanasaka Hime, before making her serialized debut in early 2008 with Muddy, which was based on a pair of one-shots she made in 2006 & 2007; it only lasted 13 chapters. Aimoto would be given a second chance at serialization with late 2009's Hokenshitsu no Shinigami/The Death God of the Infirmary, which was based on the one-shot of the same name from earlier that year. The manga starred Itsuhito Hadesu, who recently joined a local middle school as its new school nurse, though his sickly physical demeanor quickly earns him the nickname of "Dr. Hades". However, Hades is in fact an extremely friendly & kind-hearted man who wants the school's infirmary to be a place for anyone to safely recover, though he does have the ability to remove "Byoma/Illness Demons" from people's bodies, likely due to him having one sealed inside his own body, causing his physical look. In essence, Hokenshitsu no Shinigami was Hell Teacher Nube for a new generation of readers, only starring the school nurse instead of a teacher, though the initial suspenseful horror mood did eventually give way to more of a lighter mood, complete with sexy gags, with the series even being officially categorized as a "school horror comedy". In terms of "performance" in the magazine, Aimoto's second series tended to appear in the latter half more often than not, but it was still a successful series in its own right, running until mid-2011 for 87 chapters, across 10 volumes, & even won the second ever Booklog Manga Grand Prize Award in 2011. Shueisha also produced a voice comic/vomic adaptation of Chapters 2 & 3 in February 2011 as part of the TV program Sakiyomi Jum-Bang!, with Tomoaki Maeno voicing Dr. Hades.
Following Hokenshitsu no Shinigami, Sho Aimoto would return to making one-shots, before debuting Kemono Jihen in Jump Square in late 2016, which has since gone on to achieve more success than her previous work, as it's still running (& currently at 19 volumes, almost doubling her previous series) and even received a single cour TV anime adaptation in 2021; Aimoto also did a one-shot for Ultra Jump in 2022 based on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6: Stone Ocean. While her start with Muddy was a failure, Sho Aimoto showed her talents well with Hokenshitsu no Shinigami, which then later allowed her to truly thrive with Kemono Jihen. Who knows, maybe her current success might one day allow her prior success to be given a chance to find a new audience, as there have been instances of that happening, like the Fuma no Kojirou OVAs because of Saint Seiya, or the Ayatsuri Sakon TV anime because of Hikaru no Go.
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Despite what you'd normally think by the name, Kenji Sakaki is a female mangaka & is even the wife of gag manga legend Kyosuke Usuta, creator of Sexy Commando Gaiden & Pyu to Fuku! Jaguar, with the two even having two children & Sakaki occasionally posting manga shorts on her Twitter account about her life raising them. Prior to all of this, though, Kenji Sakaki was an assistant to Akira Amano during Reborn!'s serialization, while also making a couple of her own one-shots that would get published in Akamaru Jump & Jump the Revolution! in 2005 & 2006, respectively. She would break through & make her serialized debut, though, in late 2010 with Enigma (stylized as ǝnígmǝ), the story of Sumio Haiba, a high school student who occasionally falls asleep & has premonitions of future events, which he then writes into his "Dream Diary", & if he has a bad premonition then he tries to prevent it from happening. After taking the mysterious E-Test, though, Sumio winds up being the leader of a group of fellow students who all have their own psychic powers (precognition, size transformation, invisibility, psychokinesis, etc.), and together they take on the main villain of the series, the titular Enigma that's in charge of the E-Test itself. Later on, a second story arc happens involving a force known only as Cannibal, but the majority of Enigma is focused around the first arc. Overall, Enigma was a case of a series simply sliding its way down the "ranks" of Shonen Jump, starting off in the first half of the magazine, but slowly making its way further & further back, until it eventually came to an end in late 2011, after 55 chapters across seven volumes. I imagine the stuff with Cannibal was meant to be longer, since it apparently only covers the last two volumes, but by that point the series was on the verge of cancellation. Still, the general reception I can find of Enigma is a positive one, with it even ending nicely, & despite its (seemingly) earlier finish than some others Shueisha still produced a short vomic adaptation that came out in April 2011 for Sakiyomi Jun-Bang!, with Satoshi Hino voicing Sumio.
Following Enigma, Kenji Sakaki would continue to make the occasional manga, including 2015's Love Dester for Shonen Jump+ (which ran until 2018 for 12 volumes, eclipsing Enigma), & is now making 2022's Tokyo Underworld, also for Jump+, which is currently at five volumes & Shueisha itself actually simulpublishes it in English via Manga Plus.
Naoki Iwamoto first made their mark in manga by making it to the Top 4 in Jump's Best Newcomer Manga Award in 2003 with the one-shot Golden Dawn. Following that, Iwamoto would spend the next six years making five additional one-shots that were published in either Akamaru Jump or issues of Weekly Shonen Jump between 2004 & 2009. Finally, Naoki Iwamoto made their serialized debut with early 2011's magico, the story of Emma, a country girl who comes to the big city & suddenly finds herself wanted by all manner of men. Right as she's about the be forcibly wed to the "King", though, a young mage named Shion Elphias Levi arrives to rescue her, saying that she's the legendary "Echidna" who has power strong enough to destroy the world, if put in the wrong hands; said power is why she was wanted by so many men. Shion decides to protect Emma from any & all mages who wish to have the power of Echidna for themselves, all while the two figure out how to perform the ritual of Magico, which is said to seal away the power of Echidna. As one can easily see, magico wound up being a mix of magic-based action series, as Shion fights other mages to protect Emma, & romance series, as Shion & Emma's feelings for each other strengthened over time. Possibly due in part to that, the manga's performance in Jump ebbed & flowed, starting off strong before dropping, only to continually rise & fall over & over, indicating that readers in Japan were likely interested in the growing relationship between Shion & Emma enough to keep it going, but there was just something that kept it from truly recovering from the back half of the magazine for longer stretches of time. Eventually, magico would wind up getting cancelled in mid-2012 after 65 chapters, and those who have read the manga all agree that Iwamoto was forced to bring things to an end earlier than expected. However, Iwamoto was allowed to make an epilogue to properly wrap everything up that appeared in Jump NEXT! later that same year, & in the end the manga totaled eight volumes; Shueisha also produced a short vomic adaptation of the manga in October 2011 for Sakiyomi Jum-Bang!, with Romi Park voicing Shion. Overall, magico is a true cult classic series from Jump's Silver Age, as most of those who have read it absolutely adore it, and despite being cancelled most feel that the epilogue more than makes up for that. As for Naoki Iwamoto, they'd return to making one-shots following magico's end & have continued to do just that, though from late 2021 to mid-2022 they did have a second serialization in Saikyo Jump, Hitoki Ittai Buttobuster, which was based on a toy line by Takara Tomy.
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Without a doubt, Akira Toriyama will go down as one of the most important mangaka in the entire history of Weekly Shonen Jump, and that's because of just two manga: Dr. Slump & Dragon Ball. After the meteoric success of those two series, Toriyama was pretty much a made man who would never have to make another manga again unless he truly wanted to, which he would do on rare occasion. This resulted in stuff like early 1997's Tokimecha, late 1997's Cowa!, mid-1998's Kajika, & mid-2000's Sand Land, all titles that ran for no longer than 14 chapters (Tokimecha was only three!), following which Akira Toriyama would effectively retire from making manga, only really drawing here & there for the rare one-shot, super-short series (no longer than three chapters), & the occasional outside project, usually his guaranteed work as part of the Dragon Quest franchise. However, almost 13 years to the issue after Sand Land's finale, Toriyama returned to Shonen Jump for one last manga, mid-2013's Jaco the Galactic Patrolman. The series starred the titular Jaco, a member of the Galactic Patrol who is assigned to protect Earth from an incoming alien invasion, only to wind up crash landing on the planet & befriending Dr. Omori, a scientist investigating time travel who offers to help repair Jaco's spaceship, & Tights, an aspiring science fiction writer who will act as the body double of a pop start for a risky rocket launch publicity stunt. In true Toriyama fashion, Jaco was primarily a comedic series with only small bits of action here & there, but more in the line of early Dragon Ball's comedic combat, rather than the serious spectacle of later Dragon Ball. Like all his prior post-DB works, Jaco was a short series, only running for 11 chapters before ending in late 2013, totaling a single volume. However, Jaco the Galactic Patrolman is easily the most relevant of Toriyama's later manga runs, because of the revelations made in the last couple of chapters. Namely, the entire series was actually a prequel to Dragon Ball, with Tights being revealed at the end as Bulma's older sister, and the whole "alien invasion" that Jaco was meant to stop (but wound up missing because of a distraction by Tights) was a Saiyan pod crashing down, namely the one containing the future Son Goku!
Jaco the Galactic Patrolman was simulpublished in English by Viz, while in Japan it'd receive a vomic adaptation in January 2014 for Sukiyomi Jan-Bang!, one of the very last ones in fact. Then, in 2015, Jaco himself would be more properly integrated into Dragon Ball by appearing in the movie Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' as part of the crew that fights against a revived Freiza's forces, followed by him making the occasional appearance in midquel TV anime Dragon Ball Super, alongside Tights. As mentioned before, Akira Toriyama would reveal that Jaco the Galactic Patrolman will likely be the last manga he ever draws himself, & even called the series "his favorite story and main character that he has created", and he's so far stuck to that, as he only outlines the still-running Dragon Ball Super manga, with Toyotaro handling the actual artwork, which nearly matches Toriyama's style exactly.
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As you can see, this entire second half of The Ages of Jump Encore has been filled with manga that got ended early via cancellation, though they at least all had something interesting to them from a meta sense, so we might as well end The Ages of Jump off with, as of this piece, the last Jump manga to have been saved from cancellation (sort of). After getting an honorable mention in 2005 at the 70th Tezuka Awards, Toshinori Takayama made their professional debut in 2008 under the pen name Yama Takayama, drawing a science & engineering manga for Ohmsha titled Manga de Wakaru Sequence Seigyo/Understanding Sequence Control via Manga; Takayama would do the same thing for manga regarding electronic circuits & semiconductors for Ohmsha in 2009 & 2010. During that time, Takayama would also draw a one-shot relating to the Reborn! card game Southern Cross Battle, which would then lead to Takayama (now using their real name) to make a Reborn! spin-off manga called Vongola GP Kuru! that ran in Saikyo Jump for three volumes throughout all of 2012. Following that, Takayama would make a one-shot for Jump NEXT! & digital service Jump LIVE in 2013 called Keitai Shojo/Mobile Phone Girl, which would then lead to the final subject of The Ages of Jump, early 2014's i・Shojo. As one can guess from the title, the manga technically starred Ibis, the virtual "instructor" of the legendary "Magic App" that one can download onto their cell phone & have their wishes granted, usually those related to love & affection. Because of this, iShojo (I'll stop using the dot, for typographical reasons) was primarily an episodic series, with each trio of chapters focusing on a different high school student dealing with love, though since the focus was mainly around one school in particular (Ifu'on Academy) there was still a recurring cast, usually made up of prior users of the Magic App. An interesting concept, sure, but unfortunately it didn't result in any decent performance in the magazine, as iShojo dropped down the ranks rather quickly, before eventually getting cancelled in mid-2014 after 20 chapters, the last of which actually saw Ibis get a physical representation for whenever the app is used, due to a wish. However, this isn't actually the end of Takayama's first serialization!
Despite more or less bombing in Weekly Shonen Jump, Takayama was actually allowed to continue making more iShojo, though this time it would be via digital-only serialization, fittingly enough. At first the series would simply continue via Jump LIVE in July 2014, seemingly in the same month as the last physical chapter, but after three last chapters of monthly serialization the series would come to yet another end, finishing out at three volumes. The reason for this, though, was simply because Shueisha was putting an end to Jump LIVE as its digital service, replacing it with Shonen Jump+, which still runs to this day. Likely to help push Jump+ as a brand new service, & also likely to help promote it, iShojo was turned into a new series, i・Shojo+. Debuting alongside Jump+ in September 2014, this was a soft reboot of the series, though since it was already semi-episodic that didn't really mean much, other than starting back over from a new Chapter/Volume 1. However, Takayama would also go on to introduce a rival program for the Magic App, the "Apostle App" that's all about fulfilling "desires" over "wishes", complete with its own instructor, Elenora. Compared to the original series, Takayama would go on to have good success with iShojo+, serializing it digitally until mid-2017 across 14 volumes, giving the entire iShojo duology a total of 17 volumes; not bad for a series originally cancelled after just 20 chapters. Following iShojo+, Toshinori Takayama would do a couple of one-shots for Jump+, before moving over to other publications & publishers for future serializations, like early 2020's Furinjima for Shueisha's Grand Jump Mecha, late 2020's Bareteru! Cocktail Nights for Kodansha's good! Afternoon, & currently 2022's Toki-sensei wa Kigaetai for Nihon Bungeisha's Weekly Manga Goraku, all of which deal with Takayama's forte: Sexy ladies, a bit of ecchi, & sex comedy.
And with that we have truly, finally, reached the end of The Ages of Jump. At this point, all that's left are shorter series throughout Jump's history that never made it to triple-digit chapter numbers, the large majority of which were cancelled early but have no real notoriety to them that would be worth going over, unlike the majority of the titles covered in this 11th & final part. Sure, I could theoretically cover all of the Iron Age of Jump once that's truly done with, but if it'll wind up anything like the prior Ages then don't go expecting that to be done until sometime in the 2030s; we're not even a full decade into the Iron Age yet. However, despite how much of Shonen Jump's modern era is readily available in English officially, whether it's the literal entirety of the current magazine being simulpublished by Viz & the Shonen Jump subscription service, or Shueisha simulpublishing a good amount of what's running in Shonen Jump+ via the Manga Plus app, there will always be the decades upon decades of history to explore & find out about, and I only hope that The Ages of Jump can, at the very least, act as a basic & general introduction to that history for others to delve into more detail with on their own.
Hi! Great work as usual! I think that Hiroki Goto's book might have a french edition: it's called "Jump, l'age d'or du manga".
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