It’s the end of 2011 and the start of 2012. A couple of years ago there wasn’t much that could be said for events that happened within those years. However this year Hiroyuki Takei has 3 manga series running concurrently, and alot of hope for the future. So I’m going to breakdown the biggest events for each series. If you haven’t been paying attention over this last year, this should be a great recap.
Of course, I did all my research for this post by looking at Shaman King Nation. This version of the site has been around since 2008. But if you want to take a look at all the news from 2011, then click here: http://shamanking-nation.com/2011/
Shaman King
It’s been a crazy year. Within the last year, the entire Shaman King manga series was re-released in the “Remix” volume format. Even with the fast pace of the “Kang Zeng Bang” editions a year earlier, seeing Shaman King remain in print, and sell out, is very exciting to see. Additionally, new little shorts were also released, “Shaman King Remix Tracks.” These little extras were a nice warm up to some of the big shocking announcements later in the year. At first it looked like the Shaman King series would continue in March 2012, but then it was announced that before that, there would be the new series of oneshots called “Shaman King Zero” to be released in Jump X (Kai). A brand new outlet for Shaman King is hugely exciting, with 2 chapters already out in Japan. We also got an official version of a fanmade song to be added to the Shaman King music library. Coming into 2011, none of this was to be expected, which made for it to be a truly great year for Shaman King.
Jumbor
In terms of events, Jumbor remained fairly quite. The biggest news story regarding Jumbor was that all the profits made from the sale of the second volume of the series would go to help the relief effort in Japan from the earthquake and tsunami. However, where it lacked in news-making events, it made up for in storytelling. Within this last year, even in just 9 chapters, the story of Jumbor has now completely spun off from it’s original origins in “Jyuki Ningen Jumbor.”
Ultimo
Sadly, out of all of Takei’s series, Ultimo has fallen the most in 2011. One of the bright spots (for Ultimo as a series at least) was because of the closing of Borders, sales for the first 2 volumes help introduce alot of new people to the series who were not reading it in Shonen Jump previously. One of the other bright spots was that the Ultimo series was licensed and released in Spain. The third bright spot was that Ultimo received a series of “Vomics” which gave voice narration to parts of the first chapter. This gave a more hopeful feeling that Ultimo was gaining in popularity, but that appears to not be the case. In terms of bad news… First Ultimo was removed from the Shonen Jump magazine suddenly (most likely content reasons), which made a large delay in the release of new chapters until the volume release. Then, at the end of this year, the other bad news strikes that Ultimo will be moving to Jump SQ 19. This means that the frequency of the chapter releases will be even slower (4 chapters a year). This is a large decline in the series popularity in Japan, which was decreasing since the series began.
Looking ahead to 2012
The brightest star in the sky for 2012 is going to be Shaman King Flowers. A brand new series that will continue the Shaman King plotline once Zero is complete. Who knows what other Shaman King related news will also come from that!? We know we have at least one figure of Yoh coming, but maybe there are more? Maybe a new anime will get announced? Alot of potential there.
All together, there was alot of news, and most of it was good! The regrowth of the Shaman King series in Japan was extremely strong, which is great for continuing that series well into 2012. Even for Ultimo which appears to be on the downward slide, still had a few good things happen this year.
And looking at 2012 from a fandom-community-wise direction… It’s looking very favorable as well! Shaman King Nation will be getting a site redesign in early 2012. Now that the holidays are almost over, Patch Cafe will be receiving some more updates as well. New discussion topics, as well as some in-depth analysis of more Shaman King chapters. The first one will of course be Shaman King Zero Chapter 1. So expect to see that, as early as later this week. There are some other longer articles I’ll be typing up soon, so look forward to those! But I’ll try to put in some more shorter posts too. So expect Patch Cafe to be more like November in updates, rather than December.
I hope you all had a good 2011, and will be having a Happy New Year!
