In addition to this year being the 20th anniversary for the Shaman King manga series, another milestone is for the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine which is now in it’s 50th year. Beginning last year, there has been multiple promotional campaigns highlighting past Weekly Shonen Jump series and new products being released.
With Hiroyuki Takei’s departure from Shueisha as his publisher, none of his series have ever been a part of this celebration. All promotional materials exclude his Butsu Zone, Shaman King, and Jyuki Ningen Jumbor manga series. Along with this campaign, the digital distribution website “Shonen Jump Plus” has been offering limited-time free digital copies of some of the “first issues” for key manga series on a rotating basis. They had been progressing through the years, and starting on July 17th, they’ve reached the era where Shaman King was published in Weekly Shonen Jump.
The first issue containing a Shaman King chapter in this promotional campaign is the 43rd issue from 1999 which featured the first chapter of Naruto. The chapter starts on page 224 with the 59th chapter of Shaman King. The pages are exactly as they were from the original Weekly Shonen Jump issue, without any edits or modification. They also still include the advertisements in the margins. You can view this issue here.
The next issue containing a Shaman King chapter is in the combined 36th and 37th issue from 2001 which featured the first chapter of Bleach. The chapter starts on page 221 with the 147th chapter of Shaman King. Yoh Asakura from Shaman King is also featured on the cover of the issues as well. You can view this issue here.
Both of these Weekly Shonen Jump issues also contained the author comments from the Table of Contents at the end. For the 1999 issue, Hiroyuki Takei’s author comment roughly translates to: “Midnight’s Best Place, Don Quijote is nearby. I’m already buying things!” This comment references Shaman King’s Ryu’s motivation to find his “Best Place” and “Don Quijote” is a popular discount chain store in Japan. For the 2001 issue, his comment is “Our parakeet learned to talk. It’s unsettling to hear him tear things up when I’m alone.” Hiroyuki Takei has also had a pet cat when he was younger (inspiration for Matamune) and an owl when drawing the Shaman King manga series.
Since the series is no longer being published by Shueisha, they did not include any additional ads for promoting the volume sales within the digital version. The reason why these may be able to be distributed with Shaman King included is because these issues are considered a “reprint” rather than a new work, which may not need Hiroyuki Takei’s approval. It’s not clear if Hiroyuki Takei or Kodansha (his current publisher) had approved this reprint prior to it’s release.
Butsu Zone concluded in Weekly Shonen Jump in issue 31 in 1997 (3 issues before One Piece began). Hiroyuki Takei, whom is friends with Eiichiro Oda, had joked that he passed the torch to One Piece in Weekly Shonen Jump and was rooting for it’s success from the very beginning. The original short-lived manga series Jyuki Ningen Jumbor released in 2007 and currently no issues from that year are available for reading as part of this promotional campaign at this time.
The Weekly Shonen Jump issues are available until September 30th, 2018. This may be the last time you will see the Shaman King series released under the Shueisha brand.
