Shonen Jump, the ultimate comic art

'The
challenge is that people know ‘Dragon Ball Z’ and liked it, and it’s a very popular merchandising property, but many boys don’t know the comic even
exists'

Shonen Jump, the
ultimate comic art

Japanese import title will target early teen boys

By David Moore

If one of America’s largest exports is its popular culture, these days the trade is largely a one-way deal. America far more often finds itself beaming images around the world than gathering around the tube for the latest sitcom from Mozambique.
   But increasingly there's an exception to this rule, and the country is not Britain, notwithstanding the success here of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and "the Osbournes."
   It is Japan, and its influence may be greatest in cartoons, such as the highly successful anime series “Dragon Ball Z” on the Cartoon Network and “Yu-Gi-Oh” on WB Kids.
   Behind it all is the Japanese comic book art known as manga.
   Now the top-selling manga title in Japan, Shonen Jump, is taking a shot at cracking the American market and will include “Dragon Ball Z” and “Yu-Gi-Oh” as regular features in the magazine.
   Shonen Jump is launching in November through a partnership of Shueisha, publisher of the Japanese edition and the largest manga purveyor in the world, and Viz Communications, the leading U.S. producer of manga and anime, the film version of manga, seen in movies such as "Akira" and "Princess Mononoke."
   Seiji Horibuchi, the founder and president of Viz, says that anime’s particular cachet in American pop culture is a result of the pressures shaping it in its homeland.
   “American animation has an excellent history but tends to be kind of the same for a long time,” says Horibuchi. “For example, with a comic like Superman or the X-Men, it’s just a character and the publisher keeps that character for 50 years.”
    “But in Japan people get bored. Every week they want some new stuff. Because manga is a weekly, the pace of the story is pretty fast,” says Horibuchi.
Shonen Jump--the first word of whose title has connotations in Japanese culture of courageous boyhood adventures--will offer a hybrid format.
   Each 240-page issue of Shonen Jump will mix about six recurring comic titles with about 30 pages of feature articles on the anime lifestyle as exemplified by current movies, music and fashion.
    That length actually represents a significant slimming down from the Japanese edition of Shonen Jump, which routinely weights in around 430 pages and has a weekly circulation of 3.4 million copies.
Even though anime is reckoned to be somewhere between a $200 and $500 million business in the U.S., there are few expectations that Shonen Jump will burst out of the gate.
   For one reason, Horibuchi hopes to peddle its fast-paced, story-driven manga to a demographic in the American market that hasn’t consistently reached out to magazines: boys under 16.
The last publisher to target teen boys with a major launch, Rodale, folded MH-18, a spinoff of Men's Health, after five issues.
   “The challenge is that people know ‘Dragon Ball Z’ and liked it, and it’s a very popular merchandising property, but many boys don’t know the comic even exists,” says Horibuchi.
    For now, Shonen Jump will launch with a base rate of 100,000, which Horibuchi hopes will swell to 1 million in three years’ time.
   Horibuchi says that he also plans to move from monthly to biweekly publishing.
    The real power of Shonen Jump might be in its ability to broker television deals.
   Horibuchi says that Shonen Jump is already in negotiations with the Cartoon Network to bring the more popular manga titles over to the U.S. as series.
   If successful in taking over the airwaves, manga and anime would no longer be exotic influences on American pop culture, or niches with cachet, but rather stand-alone cultural forces in their own rights.

-David Moore is a staff writer for Media Life.

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