Shonen Jump’s 100th Issue Milestone

I know that it’s been going strong in Japan for a hell of a lot longer than it has in the United States, but any manga that is published in English with the original right-to-left reading style intact hitting a milestone like this is damn impressive.

Viz Media isn’t a slouch, they know this too. So in celebration of the magazine hitting issue #100 (on shelves now!), they’ve decided to dedicate a week, starting on the 27th of March and ending on the 1st of April, towards paying homage to a different manga hero each day on the company’s newly updated Shonen Jump website.

They’re calling this new initiative “SJ Heroes Week” and are looking to increase new readers knowledge of the characters contained within the monthly tome’s covers. I’m not kidding, this magazine was always one of my favorite things to pick up off the news stands what seems like ages ago with the first dozen issues. I have to warn you though, Shonen Jump is a gateway drug into reading full volumes of manga, which inevitably leads to increased anime consumption and all-around weeabooness.

To quote the email we got from SJ Senior Editor, Joel Enos:

“SHONEN JUMP magazine is the most popular manga magazine today, with over a million readers in its original language version in Japan, as well as hundreds of thousands of fans in the U.S. And now SHONEN JUMP is expanding its online coverage with new daily updates to give readers more of what they want – features on manga, anime, card games and video games, plus exclusive online manga content for subscribers. During the next two months, we’ll also profile SHONEN JUMP heroes from a variety of SHONEN JUMP’s most loved manga series. From international sensations like NARUTO and ONE PIECE to beloved classics like DRAGON BALL, we will spotlight every SJ hero that ever came out in the U.S. in either graphic novel format or in the magazine!”

In my humble opinion, Shonen Jump is a very important piece of literature not only for us Americans, but for the Japanese as well. Many of the biggest serialized anime series got their start in the pages of this massive montly magazine. Heck, if they managed to offer a paperless version of the magazine, I’d be all for signing up for another subscription.

Regardless, congrats to SJ for making it to 100 issues and here’s to them getting to 200!

by Alan Smithee

I sit upon my throne as the owner/shogun of this site, WatchPlayRead. But it wasn't always so. I too have had blogspots, I've done other community blogs, I've even written professionally for other sites out there...yet none of them provided the content I had a real passion for. It is then that I became tired of being a small cog in a big machine, and of writing about nothing but game news after game news article and the periphery that comes from such schlock, like knowing who Michael Pachter and Bobby Kotick are. I decided to start MediaWhoreNetwork.com and ran up my post count there for about 2 years, commenting about any and everything that I wanted to. I even started a weekly podcast that I feel has come into its own. It wasn't until earlier this year that I realized that having the word "whore" in your URL might be a bit limiting to my potential audience. I then made the website and its branding move over to WatchPlayRead.com.

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