Since then, the series has been continuously published in the magazine, barring occasional breaks taken by Eiichiro Oda. The One Piece manga began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump 1997 Issue 34. This is purely to help the indexing process, and does not in any way indicate extra material for the issue. Īny issues released immediately before major-holiday weeks are billed as "double" issues ( e.g. Note that these, much like the cover dates of American comics, tend to be weeks or even months behind each issue's actual release date, with the "first" issue in any given year usually released in late November of the previous year. Issues are indexed by year, and each issue's cover billed with a number (which resets with every new year) and a specific date the issue that published the first chapter of One Piece, for instance, is billed as 1997's Issue 34 - August 4. Christmas, usually corresponding to the last week in December.Obon, usually corresponding to the second or third week in August.Golden Week, usually corresponding to the first week in May.New Year's Day, usually corresponding to the first week in January.However, there are four "major" holidays whose corresponding weeks skip release entirely: Jump typically releases new issues on Mondays of each week, with semi-regular shifts to other days (most often preceding Saturdays) when the printing schedule is affected by "minor" holidays or other incidents. It has maintained this dominance since at least the mid-2000s. In any case, One Piece is almost always placed among the first four features of any given issue, colored or otherwise. The exact accuracy of this metric is debatable while most color features are promotional in nature (indeed, Jump traditionally features the first chapter of any new series as a Lead Color), and series that consistently rank last as black-and-white features are often ended within a few months, there have been notable exceptions to both patterns. When charting series popularities, fans typically focus on the black-and-white features' ordering, dismissing the color features' as purely editorial decisions. The remaining features will be printed in standard black-and-white.These may be placed anywhere after the Lead Color feature in some cases, they may even be the last feature. Several series will be Center Color ( センターカラー, Sentākarā ?) features, and also printed in color for their first few pages.The issue's cover-art will usually - but not always - be focused on this series. One series will be the Lead Color ( 巻頭カラー, Kantōkarā ?) feature, printed in color for its first few pages and placed ahead of all others.These are (imperfectly) reflected by each issue's table of contents: Jump famously reorganizes the order of its contents every week, following a combination of editor initiative and reader response. Note how all the color features are set apart from the standard ones. Table of contents for a standard 2011 issue, featuring One Piece as the week's Lead Color. Įvery issue prints the first few pages of several different series in color for One Piece, this usually manifests in the series' famed color spreads. Its print quality is frequently noted to be "yellowed" or otherwise substandard, as it primarily uses recycled paper. The typical issue of Jump is between 450 and 500 pages long, containing around twenty different installments of manga interspersed with editorial features, celebrity interviews, advertisements, and other promotional materials (often for anime or video games licensed off one of its manga series).
The closest contender, Hunter x Hunter, began in 1998 and publishes new material on an inconsistent basis.) (In 2016, with the conclusion of the long-running KochiKame (and the migration of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to an offshoot magazine some years before), One Piece became Jump's oldest active series. In addition to One Piece, it has launched some of Japan's most iconic shonen properties, including KochiKame, Dragon Ball, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Rurouni Kenshin, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Naruto, Bleach, and My Hero Academia. As its title suggests, Weekly Shonen Jump primarily targets the shonen demographic of teenage and pre-teen boys, and trends toward series with majority-male casts and spectacle-heavy plots (though recent polls have indicated several of its series, One Piece included, may actually have majority-female readerships).