The Ages of Jump Encore Part 1: "Play 'Freebird'!"

Close to eight years ago, a.k.a. sometime in late 2015, I came up with the "brilliant" idea of using Wikipedia's list of every single manga that had run in Weekly Shonen Jump up to that point, making note of as many notable titles as I could from that list (either because of length, notoriety, infamy, or simply getting an anime adaptation), and giving a basic & general overview of every single one that I made note of, all in an attempt at maybe providing some context to the evolution of what is, to many, the most iconic & famous manga magazine of all time. To help organize things I relied on the concept of Hesiod's Five Ages of Man (ignoring the idea that each successive age is mostly a worse one than the last), mainly because Jump already had an officially recognized "Golden Age", so I thought it'd be neat to define what came before that point as a "Bronze Age" (Get it? Because it's essentially "third place", in overall importance? Ha ha...) & what came a little bit after as a "Silver Age", while the short period between the Golden & Silver Ages would be a "Dark Age", though later I'd retcon it as also worthy of being called a "Heroic Age", if only to maintain the Hesiod terminology. The end result of that was The Ages of Jump, a seven-part series that took up all of January & February of 2016 (because I was still mad enough to do that much writing & research in that short a period of time, & I've since aged enough to know better) in which I went over 123 different Jump manga, covering from 1968's Chichi no Tamashii to 2014's My Hero Academia. In the end, the series actually did much better than I ever expected, so much so that if you search "Ages of Jump" on Google, the top result is literally a featured snippet listing the four ages that I covered; that makes them all but official, essentially!

With a very positive overall reception, I decided to revisit this concept two years later in August of 2018, to celebrate Jump's 50th Anniversary, as well as fill in some notable gaps that the original series had not covered, but I felt really should have. The end result of that was The Ages of Jump Redux, a two-part series that covered an additional 25 different Jump manga, which also included six series that had debuted after My Hero Academia, starting with Black Clover, and since there was one more Age of Man left from Hesiod that I hadn't used I decided to call this current era of Jump that those six manga came from the "Iron Age". While I don't think The Ages of Jump Redux received anywhere near the same reception that the original Ages did, I was pretty pleased with the end result, which now totaled 148 different Jump manga that debuted between 1968 & 2017; for proper context, though, that's just 19.89% of all Jump manga that have existed, as of mid-2023. Since then, a new resource has come about for looking through Jump's entire history, & that is Jajanken: Weekly Shonen Jump Lab, a literal comprehensive database of every single regular issue of Jump that's ever been made, complete with every single serialized manga that's ever appeared in the magazine's history. Then there's also Weekly Shonen Jump Exhibition Volumes 1-3, a trio of large books that were part art book, part mangaka interviews made for Jump's 50th Anniversary in 2018 that go over a great deal of series that Shueisha itself felt were important to the history of the magazine.

Having gone through the trouble of looking over all 744+ series that have been serialized in Jump (so far) for the sake of figuring out the magazine's history of early cancellations, I came across some last little stragglers that I missed out on over the past nine parts of The Ages of Jump. Some were 100+-chapter series that I really should have included, if only because I feel every series that hit triple digits, in general, should be acknowledged & celebrated, while others were certainly shorter but still had something important worth making note of, especially in light of other pieces I've written (or even made a video of) since doing the Redux. However, I only focused on the original four ages this time around, as while it was fun to take a short peek into the Iron Age in 2018, it's still nowhere near close to ending & should be given time to fully define itself.

So, to celebrate Jump's 55th Anniversary, here's the first of two final (for real, this time!) parts of The Ages of Jump, totaling 30 more Jump manga, with this being the first 15. The concert is over but there's always time for an "Encore", so let's look back at Jump's history once again & (for the last time) see "How Far We've Come".

The Tangerine Terminator: A Look at Shonen Jump's History of Early Cancellations, By the Numbers

In the 55 years since the original launch of Shonen Jump as a biweekly magazine in July of 1968, the magazine has become the iconic origin for too many classic & influential manga to count, out of a total (as of this piece) 744 different series (not including one-shots) that have run in its pages. However, in strong relation to that history of legendary manga that have come from that magazine is also a rather infamous notoriety of early cancellations. It's something that has existed for a long time, but the advent of simulpublishing in English literally every new manga that debuts in the magazine via Viz Media's Shonen Jump subscription service, along with the proliferation of social media making it easier than ever for fans to lament the losses of seemingly promising series, has made this phenomenon more & more known in recent years. It's very easy to come across people today online bemoaning how a new favorite series of theirs has been cut from the Jump roster too soon, and that Jump is way too cutthroat for its own good nowadays; some even argue that Jump was never this harsh with new series back in the day.

But how true is this sentiment, really? Is Shonen Jump truly more cutthroat than ever, or has Jump always been one of the more stringent manga magazines out there, all in an effort to make sure that the ones that manage to stick around for a long time are indeed the strongest titles? Since 2023 marks the 55th Anniversary of Shonen Jump, I think it's time we take a look at Jump's history of early cancellations, but to make sure things are as "objective" (i.e. empirical) as possible we need some hard data...

I made this image.
It is dumb & stupid & I love it.

Before we start, though, we need to lay some ground rules. First, just as with the history of Jump giving final chapters special treatment I went over back in 2021, the information I'll be giving is sourced from Jajanken: Weekly Shonen Jump Lab, which catalogs literally every single issue of Jump from its first issue in 1968 to the most current issue that's out there. This site lists every single manga that appears in each issue & even what the title of each chapter is (& if there's an official English release there's a good chance Jajanken has them in English!), the only exception being various old one-shots; without Jajanken, it'd be nigh-impossible to get anything remotely close to true "hard data". Second, after going over literally every single manga cataloged over at Jajanken & compiling them into an Excel spreadsheet (because what's more "shonen" than collating, right?), I have categorized them across eight different stretches of length: Less Than 10 Chapters (this is mainly to sift out manga that were always intended to be short runs, as it's pretty rare for manga to get outright canceled this early on), 10 to 26 Chapters (this is the range of time most synonymous with early cancellations), 27 to 52 Chapters (i.e. up to a solid year of serialization), 53 to 99 Chapters (i.e. lasting more than one year, but not hitting triple digits), 100 to 199 Chapters, 200 to 299 Chapters, & finally 300 to 399 Chapters & 400+ Chapters (the last two of which only 25 Jump manga have ever achieved so far, so that's a good stopping point). For the purposes of what we're looking for, we will focus primarily on manga that ran somewhere between 10 & 99 chapters, i.e. roughly two to ten volumes long (or just shy of two whole years, at best), though I'll still separate them when bringing up raw numbers. With all of that out of the way, let's finally dig in deep & take a look at Shonen Jump's actual history of early cancellations!

Samurai Deeper Kyo (GBA): Not Quite First to Arrive, But Definitely Last to Leave

Launching in Japan on March 21, 2001, with a worldwide release a few months later throughout June, the Game Boy Advance has an interesting & kind of contradictory history behind it. It was the long awaited "true" follow up to the long-lived Game Boy, which first launched all the way back in 1989 (the Game Boy Color in 1998 was more of a color-supporting stopgap update), yet the GBA itself would only really be seen as Nintendo's main handheld for a scant few years before the release of the Nintendo DS in 2004/2005 (depending on the region), which almost instantly overtook the GBA as the handheld of choice, especially since the DS could also play GBA games. While the GBA would continue to see releases alongside the DS for a few years, it didn't take long for the GBA (& the Game Boy name itself) to be relegated to mostly just licensed tie-in games for movies, TV shows, & the like, with only the rare outlier, like an Yggdra Union or Summon Night: Swordcraft Story. That "relegation" does technically apply to the subject of this review, as we'll be looking at a tie-in to a TV anime, but depending on where it came out it's either one of the GBA's earlier releases... or one of its very last.

Japanese title screen, but all that's different
is the copyright & the logo being slightly smaller.

Debuting in the pages of Weekly Shonen Magazine in mid-1999, Samurai Deeper Kyo by Akimine Kamijyo was a little different from the usual Magazine fare by being more focused on wild & over-the-top action, something you'd expect more from a Jump or Champion manga than Magazine. Still, the tale of the wanderer Mibu Kyoshiro, the feared samurai Demon Eyes Kyo that co-inhabits the same body as Kyoshiro, & the mysterious Mibu Clan (and rumored Crimson King) that seemingly runs all of Edo-Era Japan in secret found itself an audience, resulting in a 38-volume run that ended in mid-2006, during which a 26-episode TV anime adaptation by Studio Deen would air in Japan throughout the second half of 2002. Said anime, though, was wildly different from the manga, with all of the normally human (if still super-powered) villains now being revealed to be demonic creatures called Kenyo that came to Earth via a meteorite that crash landed during the Battle of Sekigahara; it's easily one of the most wildly different anime adaptations of a manga ever made. However, it's this anime interpretation that would define Samurai Deeper Kyo outside of Japan for the most part, as while TokyoPop did release the manga in English during the 00s (with Del Rey Manga finishing things up in 2010 after Kodansha pulled all of its licenses from TP), it was Media Blasters' DVD release of the anime throughout 2003 & 2004 that easily became more well known.

Media Blasters would keep the anime in print with a boxset re-release in 2005, but the next re-release was the most interesting one of all. In an effort to expand out to other mediums, MB eventually decided to also license the Game Boy Advance game based on the Kyo anime, one that had come out in Japan back in December 2002, more or less alongside a 2D fighting game for the PS1 that would remain Japan-exclusive. Media Blasters would do the localization work for the game itself under the Anime Works Game Shop name, but since it wasn't a video game publisher it had to find a partner to handle that, eventually finding one in the form of Destineer (via its Bold Games label), a company that actually had prior anime game experience after releasing two Fullmetal Alchemist games for the DS in North America. Media Blasters would release the GBA game as a bonus with the anime boxset re-re-release, while it's not really known if Destineer ever actually released the game as a standalone product, though today it's readily sold as such online (good luck getting it for cheap today, though!). However, the most interesting thing about this whole endeavor is that, while the game originally came out in Japan in late 2002, the English release in North America wouldn't happen until February 2008(!), making it the last individual release for the Game Boy Advance anywhere in the world; Europe would receive a handful of double-packs later in 2008, but those were all re-releases. So, while my expectations aren't exactly high, let's see how this experimental endeavor for Media Blasters worked out (MB would only ever release one more game, though that was digital-only), and judge whether Samurai Deeper Kyo for the Game Boy Advance is a good "final game" for the console... and, let's face it, that's not exactly a high bar to pass, considering some other "final games" for other consoles.

Celebrating 55 Years of "Weekly" Manga Goraku, Manga's Island of Misfit Toys

I've celebrated notable anniversaries (i.e. 5s & 0s) for various manga magazines here over the years, whether it's numerous ones regarding Weekly Shonen Jump (wink wink nudge nudge for next month), a singular entry for Monthly Shonen Ace, or even a Theory Musing for the amusingly semi-shared trilogy of Weekly Shonen Sunday, Weekly Shonen Magazine, & Weekly Shonen Champion. However, there's a commonality between all of those, and it's the simple fact that they're all shonen magazines, i.e. they're primarily aimed at adolescent boys, and while titles from those kinds of magazines tend to to be the most popular & appeal to a much wider audience than intended (at least, in concept), there is much, much more to manga than just those kinds of magazines. I will fully admit that something like shojo manga (& anime) is a rather notable hole in the Master List (what can I say other than "I'm can be a bit of a stereotypical guy at times"), so while this piece won't be about the genderal "opposite" of shonen manga in any way, we can at least age things up a bit & take a focused look on a seinen magazine, and how its unique editorial stance has turned it into a bit of a refuge for various mangaka & franchises of old.

The left isn't the literal first issue of this magazine's entire history,
but it is the first issue that the current issue numbering is connected to.

In January 1964 publisher Nihon Bungeisha released the very first issue of Manga Goraku Dokuhon (all written in kanji; literally "Comic Entertainment Reader"), a biweekly manga magazine aimed at adults, specifically those in their 30s to 50s. Alongside Weekly Manga Times by Houbunsha (allegedly the first ever weekly manga magazine, launched in November 1956) & the now-defunct Manga Sunday by Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha (launched in August 1959), Manga Goraku Dokuhon was one of the earliest seinen manga magazines ever published in Japan, and in 1968 the title was altered typographically, with "Goraku" now written in katakana & "dokuhon" written in lower case English, before being changed to its current name of Weekly Manga Goraku (kanji-kanji-katakana) in August 1971. However, despite dating back to 1964, which means that it technically turns 60 next year, the actual issue numbers that Goraku currently uses only date back to 1968, i.e. when the magazine had its first (typographical) name change & switched over to a weekly publishing rate, and unlike most other manga magazines doesn't reset its issue numbers every year, so issues that come out right now actually are in the 2,800s! Likewise, Goraku has a long history of allowing series to run for seemingly as long as their creators feel like, resulting in numerous manga that have run for literal decades (Sake no Hosomichi, Edomae no Shun, Tenpai: Mahjong Hiryu Densetsu), some of which are still running to this very day. 1992's Minami no Teioh tops them all at 171 volumes & counting, making it the fourth longest manga of all time by total volume count (third longest for a single series); for context, this is a series about a notorious loan shark who effectively charges an additional 1% interest per day!

However, another aspect of Weekly Manga Goraku has defined the magazine to a notable extent, and that is the editorial policy of welcoming in mangaka & series that were once popular & successful, but eventually "lost their place" (in a sense), whether it's because of a change in magazine or editorial interests elsewhere, readers' tastes changing with the times, or (at least for one instance) the mangaka themselves becoming unwanted by most other publishers because of scandal & controversy. In the end, Nihon Bungeisha's iconic seinen magazine has a history that's like a coin with two faces: One is of the long-running series that have continued on for literal decades, resulting in a variety of stories that have continued to "entertain" readers across generations, while the other is made up of the various series & creators that have been able to make various comebacks over the past half-century+, allowing once-iconic franchises to continue to thrive... and, trust me, some of these have certainly thrived in this magazine! So, to celebrate Weekly Manga Goraku's 55th Anniversary this year (or, at least, the 55th Anniversary as a weekly magazine), let's go over various manga & mangaka that were given new leases on life via this seinen juggernaut & see why Weekly Manga Goraku truly is, in some way, manga's equivalent to The Island of Misfit Toys.

Obscusion B-Side: Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog: 1995 (Part 2)

Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:

"On the one hand, the Jag would wind up being Atari's second-most appealing console for third-parties, with 10 different companies releasing games without Atari Corporation itself co-publishing. On the other hand... we've already seen the end of Ocean, Virgin, & Williams' support for the console, and aside from Telegames... all other third-party publishers we'll be seeing in this series will literally only release a single game for the Jaguar, with only one exception that will publish two. It's only early April, & already things aren't looking much better for the Jaguar..."

The year 1995 continues on into its second quarter, following a quintet of third-party releases, something that the Jag desperately needed. With the first ever Electronics Entertainment Expo on the horizon, Atari Corporation has some things ready to showcase at the show & needs all the help it can get in making sure that the Jaguar looks appealing when compared to the incoming Sega Saturn & Sony PlayStation, both of which were already out in Japan but were planned for release later in September abroad & were ready to be showcased at E3. Luckily, two more games would see release for the Jaguar sometime in April, roughly a month before E3, so let's start this second of a five-part look into the Atari Jaguar's 1995 with Atari Corp's first release of the year!

While the Atari that currently exists no longer actually owns the rights to it, after Rebellion bought them during the 2013 bankruptcy proceedings, Battlezone was arguably one of Atari's most iconic games, right up there with Pong, Breakout, & Missile Command. Therefore, it's not shocking at all that a new Battlezone was one of the very first games that was greenlit & announced for the Atari Jaguar back in 1993, alongside Cybermorph & Tempest 2000. Originally titled "Battlezone 2000" (as that numbering would become a commonality with other Jag-developed updates of classic Atari titles), the game would go through numerous changes over development, so much so that after being showcased during Summer CES 1994, the dev team at Atari Corporation decided to rename it to Hover Strike, partially due to the fact that the traditional tanks of Battlezone had since been changed into hover tanks, among other changes from the original source material. Amusingly enough, Atari Corp's split-apart sister company Atari Games, which by this point was 100% its own completely separate entity, had its own Battlezone knock-off for arcades in 1994's T-MEK, with a Jag port in development that never came out; ports to the 32X & MS-DOS did come out, though. Interestingly, while Hover Strike managed to come out for the Jag in April 1995, a mere six months later, in October, saw the release of Hover Strike: Unconquered Lands, a complete remake released on the ill-fated Jaguar CD, & was even first showcased at E3 mere weeks after the original cartridge version came out; this was almost like the Osbourne effect, but for a game instead of hardware! Regardless, let's check out the original cartridge version of Hover Strike & see how it holds up all this time later.