Chapter 1
? ...I wasn’t about to call him out for reading a magazine named Weekly Shonen Whatever even though he wasn’t part of its clearly stated age demographic anymore.
The “Shonen” in Shonen Jump—and also Shonen Sunday, Shonen Champion, Shonen Ace, Weekly Shonen Magazine, etc. etc.—means “boy” in Japanese. In other words, the target demographic for all of those magazines is very literally right there in the title: they’re theoretically aimed at relatively young men/boys. I say theoretically because practically, it’s not quite that simple.
Agewise, a survey that Shueisha, the publisher behind Shonen Jump, released in 2020 found that over half of Jump’s readership was nineteen years old or older, with the largest demographic being the 27.4% of responders who fell into the twenty-five-plus age category. Concrete information on gender demographics is a little harder to come by, and the few sources I found that claimed specific numbers seemed rather spurious to me, but I did track down an article from 2012 that noted that some Jump manga at the time—Haikyu!! and Gintama, for instance—had majority-female readerships, and anecdotally, I think it’s safe to conclude that plenty of women read shonen manga (and Jump manga in particular).
? ...in his words, “Young Jump and Bessatsu have been killing it lately”...
Weekly Young Jump is, ironically, a manga magazine aimed at a slightly older readership than the ones we discussed in the previous note. Being a “seinen” magazine, it’s targeted at young adult men, which isn’t hard to guess given some of the series it’s published. Standout historical examples include Gantz, Elfen Lied, Tokyo Ghoul:re, and Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. Currently, the magazine is home to Oshi no Ko and The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You, both of which you may have heard of on account of their recent anime adaptations.
Bessatsu Shonen Magazine, meanwhile, is—as you might expect—aimed at the shonen demographic. It’s been home to quite a few popular manga as well over the course of time, including xxxHolic, Flying Witch, The Flowers of Evil, and this one pretty obscure series you probably haven’t heard of called Attack on Titan.
? I’ve got a whole stock of masterpiece oneshots filed away back at my place—Hoshino’s Continue; Fukushima’s Swimming’s on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; you name it!
The Hoshino in question here is Hoshino Katsura, author of D.Gray-man! Continue is a one-shot that was published in Shonen Jump all the way back in 2003 that more or less served as the prototype for the series that would eventually become D.Gray-man, sharing a number of broad concepts and even including the Millenium Earl (D.Gray-man’s antagonist) in more or less the exact same form he would eventually appear in in the final series.
Fukushima, meanwhile, refers to Fukushima Teppei, author of Samurai Usagi (not to be confused with Usagi Yojimbo, which is written by Stan Sakai and is something completely different). Swimming’s on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays was published in Shonen Jump in 2011, and told a story about a boy and a girl who go to the same swim school. Very little of Fukushima’s work has made it to the English-speaking market, unfortunately, and when I say “very little,” I mean “none as far as I’ve been able to find.” Hopefully that’ll change someday, though!
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