In 1968, a Japanese man named Nori Nagano decided to make a manga magazine unlike any other.
When the idea came to mind, Nagano had been in the magazine industry for nearly three decades, entering the then publishing giant Elementary School In 1951 and soon becoming an editor at Shueisha, a publishing house. Beginning in 1958, Nagano began running his own military-themed manga magazine, Shonen Book. At that time, World War II had been over for more than a decade, and although military themes could be sold, the response was mediocre.
Over time, Nagano began to think about how to be an editor. He wanted to know what readers liked to read, whether the military theme was a correct choice, and whether he should give up "The Boy Book". So Nagano conducted a questionnaire survey and asked the reader 50 questions, hoping that the reader would use his own answers to outline what a truly popular work should look like.
After the questionnaire was retracted, the three keywords given by the reader aroused Nagano's interest, namely the "effort" that the reader considered most touching, the "friendship" that was most important to him, and the "victory" that the reader liked the most. Based on this questionnaire, Nagano began to call for preparations for a new manga magazine.
On August 1, 1968, the first issue of Weekly Shonen Jump was released, with Nori Nagano serving as the first editor-in-chief. 50 years later, this magazine with the theme of "hard work, friendship, victory" surpassed Marvel and DC to become the best-selling comic book magazine in the world. In addition, it also praised a man who can do qigong, a red-haired basketball player, a group of pirates who can't swim, a ninja who always has to throw his hands behind when running, and a knifeman who likes to explain to himself.
The comic magazine has influenced generations of people, but just when people thought it would shine forever, it suddenly fell into the mire of the times. At 00:00 on May 1, 2019, Japan officially launched the New Year's name "Reiwa", ending a 30-year-long heyday, while the cumulative sales of "Jump" fell to less than 1.7 million volumes in the recent year, and in the heyday of 1995, "Jump" had a history of breaking 6.5 million in annual circulation.
How does a comic go from being lonely and nameless to the top of the world, and what kind of dilemmas does it face in the present? Spanning the three eras of "Showa", "Heisei" and "Reiwa", which has influenced nearly four generations, what exactly did Jump do right and what did it do wrong to carry forward the manga?
Time to call back to the beginning of Jump.
At that time, there were already two mountains in the Japanese manga industry that were difficult to climb, one was the "Weekly Shonen Sunday" owned by the Elementary School Museum, and the other was the "Weekly Shonen Magazine" under Kodansha, and the well-known manga artists at that time had already cooperated with these two companies, and they were really weak in the face of the invitation to cooperate with "Jump".
This is the first conundrum that Jump encountered: it was impossible to find a cartoonist to produce for them. In Japan's mainstream manga industry, manga artists and magazines play different roles, mostly contributed by manga artists and published by magazines. Comic weekly magazines such as Sunday and Magazine do not produce comics themselves. Although the magazine has manga editors, the manga works are all done by cartoonists. Editors generally only do two things: suggest changes to the comic script, and urge the draft.
In desperation, "Jump" had to discover new people on its own, and Nagano also did two maverick things for this purpose.
The first was to sign an "exclusive contract" with the cartoonist, which stipulated that cartoonists who published their work in Jump could no longer make an appointment with other magazines. The second thing is to get readers to vote on the popularity of the manga in the magazine, and if the popularity of a manga is depressed for a long time, then the manga will be withdrawn from jump, commonly known as "waist chop", and replaced by other works.
In the early days of the magazine, these two things were like two shots of encouragement for newcomer manga artists, and Nagano was like a master of success in selling chicken soup, promising the manga artists that as long as you are willing to draw, as long as your work is good enough, "Jump" will have its own place, here do not look at fame, only look at the work. These two strategies had a profound impact on Jump, successfully absorbing many motivated newcomer cartoonists for Jump in the early days of its inception, but later became the "source of all evil" that squeezed cartoonists.
By the end of its first year, Jump had sold only 100,000 volumes, far less than Sunday and Magazine.
It was an era full of masters, "Father of Doraemon" Fujiko F. Fujio and "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka Needless to say, Fujio Akatsuka, the founder of the Japanese national IP "Komatsu Jun", Kotaro Ishimori, who created Kamen Rider, and Yokoyama, who focused on historical themes, these predecessors gathered in "Sunday" and "magazine" to attract a large number of readers, to break this pattern, "jump" can only find another way.
"Shame School" with soft pornography to tease readers' nerves and bad teenager fight story "Boy become a general" came into being, breaking taboo topics made "Jump" sales rise rapidly, and the authors of the two manga: Nagai Hiroshi and Hongu Hiroshi also became the two pillars of "Jump". This was followed by a great deal of controversy over the content of the Yellow Storm, with Japanese newspapers at the time even publishing articles calling on parents to resist "jump" that "poisons the minds of young people with offensive content."
Rebellion has its cost, naturally there are also gains, in the third year of its inception, the sales of "Jump" successfully exceeded 1 million.
Beginning in 1971, the annual circulation of Jump increased by 1 million every three to five years, and many manga masters who were admired by later generations gradually emerged. In 1976, "Newcomer Akimotoji" brought his "Oolong Police Station" to meet with readers, and this manga has become the most serialized manga on Jump, from the 1970s to 2016, a total of 1960 times.
By the 1980s, a blood-curdling "battle tide" began. Tetsuo Hara, Masakazu Katsura, Masami Cheda, Akira Toriyama, Araki Hiruhiko and a number of other "new generation" manga artists at that time began to create works on the theme of adventure fighting, among which the "hard fighting school" represented by Tetsuo Hara's "Hokuto Shinken" and the "beauty school" represented by Masami Tsutomu Tsutomu's "Saint Seiya" divided "jump" into two kinds of fists.
The spiritual torrent of "hard work, friendship, and victory" really exploded at this time. In 1984, Dragon Ball was born, a work that would completely change the historical status of Jump. At that time, the author of "Dragon Ball", Akira Toriyama, had just finished the serialization of the funny comic "Alare", and it was naturally difficult to avoid bringing the shadow of the previous work into the new work, so there were still many funny plots in the early "Dragon Ball".
But the fighting genre is really too hot. So at the suggestion of the editor, Akira Toriyama joined the setting of "The First Budokai in the World" and began to dilute the adventure elements with "Dragon Ball" as the core, and introduced the theme of the manga to fighting. After that, it was out of control.
The success of Dragon Ball brought a lot of popularity to Jump, and Fuji Television began talking to Shueisha about animation cooperation. Akira Toriyama was placed between publishers, magazine editors and readers, and the outside world could only continue to be serialized under the expectations and pressures of the outside world. As the story progresses, Akira Toriyama has many ideas of ending, and the story should have ended after Goku defeated the piccolo to become the number one in the world, but it was dragged into the confrontation with the "Cosmic Emperor" Frisha, and then opened the "Saru Chapter" and "Buu Chapter", and finally the story finally ended after the destruction of the demon Buu in Volume 42.
Based on "Dragon Ball", there are countless spin-offs, games and fan works, combining American comic style and oriental elements of the character story set off a "Dragon Ball fever" around the world, after the end of Dragon Ball in 1995, Toei Company, which tightened the animation copyright, also continued to develop theatrical versions and sequels, and the 2015 "Dragon Ball Super" was full of consumer IP and emotional taste, but still let the global Dragon Ball fans fall into the carnival.
Those who follow the trend have both fame and fortune, and naturally there are rebels who go against the current.
When the whole book of "Jump" is fighting, there is still such a strange person, who does not draw other worlds, fights and adventures, but focuses on the story of the real world. He was hojoji, the author of "City Hunter", and Hojoji was very stubborn, so he also cultivated a very stubborn disciple.
In 1987, Hojoji's studio welcomed a newcomer assistant who had just dropped out of college, and 10 months later the young man became self-reliant. Consistently, he also does not draw fighting, focusing on telling real-world stories, each of his characters is full of characteristics, and he has quite strict self-requirements for painting and realism.
His manga work was later photographed by television and produced into an animation release, but the animation company was dissatisfied with his story, because in the original story, the protagonist did not win in the end, so the production company asked him to rewrite the story to the "great consummation" ending of the traditional king's blood.
In a fit of rage, he interrupted his collaboration with the animation company, causing the animation to come to an abrupt halt halfway through the plot, becoming a "difficult" moment in the hearts of all comic book fans. At the same time, he tried to avoid being commercialized like Dragon Ball, and despite the great success of his comics, there was still very little commercial development around the work. On the other hand, he actively used manga and his influence, and after the completion of the work, he cooperated with Shueisha to create a scholarship to support Japanese teenagers who love basketball.
This is the rebel Yuhiko Inoue, the representative work "Slam Dunk Master".
In the 90s of the last century, "Jump" shined dazzlingly, in addition to "Dragon Ball" and "Slam Dunk Master", "Ghost White Book", "Jojo's Wonderful Adventure", "Ranger Sword Heart", "Game King" were serialized, and for a time "Jump" became a paradise for comic book fans, which was a boom brought by a group of talented and personality cartoonists.
But looking back at this history, we can see that it was also the most turbulent moment in Japanese society.
Thanks to the wartime economic system, Japan ushered in a miraculous economic take-off after World War II, and a change in social consciousness naturally accompanied it. The change in mentality of the Japanese people from breaking taboos to being enthusiastic reflects the evolution of post-war society. In the 1980s in particular, national fanaticism throughout Japan rose to the point where "America has fallen and will belong to Japan in the future." At the end of the 20th century, under the sudden financial crisis, the spirit of the whole of Japan was violently impacted, and it has not recovered until now.
So in a batch of comics in the 90s, even the sports-themed "Slam Dunk Master" also appeared in the real and thick social issues such as "bad boys", "drag racing party" and "restructuring the family". Especially outside of Jump, manga artist Naoki Urasawa came out, his style becoming more somber and thicker, and in the manga "20th Century Boy" depicts the chaos and confusion of Japanese society at the end of the century.
In the second half of the 90s, the end of the old Pillar comics was over, and the withdrawal of the journal was withdrawn. When Jump reached its peak in 1995, sales began to decline, and like the sluggish Japanese economy, Jump fell into a brief period of silence. Times changed, and the editorial department began to tap new people to support the "jump spirit" of "friendship, hard work, and victory".
In the summer of 1997, Eiichiro Oda brought One Piece to meet with readers, and two years later, Kishimoto Kishimoto began the story of Naruto, and two years later, Kubo took people to splash ink and Death was born. By 2004, these three comics had firmly ranked in the top three sales of Shueisha's manga single-liners, and at this point, the pattern of "three major migrant workers" was formed.
As for why these three films are, it is also necessary to insert a major event in the Japanese animation industry. In 1995, Evangelion, a "stream of consciousness" animation that was talked about by posterity, was born. In this anime, the protagonist Masaru Tsurugi exudes Japan's "decadence at the end of the century", and it should be known that the male protagonists in previous works are all "Showa boys", but the appearance of Masashi Tsurugi not only subverted the tone of the entire Japanese animation and manga industry after the millennium, but also became the originator of the "otaku" culture and "Heisei waste wood".
The counterattack story from "waste wood" to "Dragon Auror" has become the favorite of readers, and the three works of "Sea", "Fire" and "Death" are all telling the story of a grassroots character who constantly brushes monsters and finally moves towards "the first in the world". At the same time, the existence of the One Piece regiment in "One Piece", the Kibamura in "Naruto" and the thirteen team in "Death" make these three works accurately cut to the spiritual core of "friendship, hard work, and victory".
But even with the support of the three pillars, "Jump" still inevitably ushered in a decline in sales, and since 2007, the annual circulation of the weekly magazine has been maintained at 270,000-280,000 volumes. With the rise of electronic media, the inevitable retreat of print magazines to the second line seems to be a historical necessity, on the other hand, Japan's animation and manga industry, which began in the millennium, has been tilting towards "charming houses" to please this group of young people in a "low-desire society".
The drawbacks of low birthrate, aging and wealth concentration are becoming increasingly prominent in Japan, and Young people in Japan have long stopped eating chicken soup and chicken blood, and they now just want to live in a cramped space and be a "dead salted fish" in the cyber world. From 2015 to 2016, naruto and death were completed, and the manga artists, who had been squeezed by publishers and editors, finally ran out of creativity, put their pens on hold, and the two manga were stamped with "rotten tails" by readers.
Two of the three pillars are missing, and the bitterly supported "One Piece" can only continue to be serialized hard, and the media learned when visiting Eiichiro Oda that this amazing manga artist can only sleep for three hours a day, and readers can't help but sweat for Oda's body while admiring the grand and wonderful "One Piece World".
Green and yellow do not pick up.
"Jump" has tried to hold up new pillars in the "post-One Piece" era to maintain magazine sales, but neither "Gintama", "Prisoner of Food" nor "Tutor" has enough strength to support the other half of the magazine, even the high-profile "Next Generation No.1" "My Hero Academia", which has recently been criticized for too thick lines and character setting problems.
Comics also have "c bits", and the cover "c bits" characters in each issue of Jump magazine are generally the protagonists of popular comic works, but "Jump", released on July 3, 2017, chose the giant breasted female character wearing bikini in "Yu nai classmate of Yu Nai of Yusho" as the cover character, which was a surprising move, and many readers saw it as a signal that "Jump" raised the white flag to the "charming house".
In today's emphasis on "political correctness", this kind of "consumption of female color" has once again aroused controversy, but unlike "Breaking the Shame Academy" to challenge the traditional discourse power, this time it is more complaints from the people. Even if the politicization issue is put aside, only from the work, like "Yu Nai Classmate", blindly stuffing "welfare" and building a "harem" in the manga, and pleasing the "otaku" readers with a pandering posture, may also be the unavoidable concession and compromise of "Jump".
In an era of cultural pluralism, "Jump" can no longer represent the common values and beliefs of young people of a nation, the tide of information is surging and people's choices are increasing. With difficult speech and changing times, Nagano, who advocated "facing the reader's heart", died of esophageal cancer in 2001 at the age of 75.