Weekly Shonen Jump, launched by Shueisha in 1968, is the best-selling manga magazine ever, with over 7.5 billion copies sold. Many of the most popular series in the world first ran in its pages.
Shueisha was established in 1925 as the entertainment publishing division of Shogakukan, becoming a separate, independent company the following year in 1926. Headquartered in the Hitotsubashi area of Chiyoda, Tokyo, it is the largest publishing company in Japan, producing magazines, manga, light novels and books.
Shueisha launched Weekly Shonen Jump on 11 July 1968 to compete with the already successful Weekly Shonen Magazine and Weekly Shonen Sunday. Initially a biweekly simply called Shonen Jump, it became a weekly in 1969. Chapters that run in the magazine are later collected into tankobon volumes under the Jump Comics imprint.
The magazine became a sales juggernaut. It has sold over 7.5 billion copies since 1968, making it the best-selling comic and manga magazine, ahead of its main rivals. The mid-1980s to mid-1990s were its peak, with weekly circulation reaching 6.53 million copies in 1995 and a total readership of about 18 million people in Japan.
Jump's lineup reads like a roll call of manga history. One Piece, Dragon Ball, Naruto, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Slam Dunk and KochiKame all originated in Weekly Shonen Jump, and all rank among the top-selling manga of all time. The titles run heavy on action and a healthy dose of comedy.
Editorial culture mattered as much as the talent. Hiroki Goto, who became chief editor in 1986, oversaw major circulation gains and described a simple philosophy: aim to create manga that everybody can enjoy, with no rigid rules, using manga alone as the magazine's weapon to stand out in a crowded entertainment market.
As print declined in the 2000s and 2010s, Shueisha moved aggressively to digital. It launched the Shonen Jump+ app and website in Japan in 2014, which sells the magazine digitally and hosts app-exclusive series. By January 2020 the app had been downloaded more than 13 million times.
The company also built a global pipeline. In January 2019 Shueisha launched Manga Plus, an English-language service available in most countries that offers same-day chapters of current Jump titles for free. Together with Shogakukan, Shueisha owns Viz Media, which publishes both companies' manga in North America.
Compiled from public records.
