Shonen Jump’s Terrible Schedule Catches Up With Kagurabachi

Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump magazine has a very demanding schedule for each of its franchises, and that schedule has unfortunately caught up with its hot hit Kagurabachi with some noticeable issues in the latest chapter. Takeru Hokazono’s Kagurabachi has been one of the biggest new releases hitting the magazine in the past couple of years as fans have been loving it even before the first chapter officially released. It’s been on a hot streak ever since then, and is even in the midst of celebrating its second anniversary. But that also seems to have raised the demands around each chapter as well.

Kagurabachi Chapter 95 hit the pages of Shonen Jump this past week, and fans couldn’t help but notice that some of the pages were unfortunately incomplete. As the chapter continues to work through an intense new phase of fights, many of the pages had some panels that were left in the rough sketch phase and weren’t as complete as the others. While this isn’t an issue just limited to Kagurabachi’s run, it’s another sign of the sometimes terrible schedule that Shonen Jump’s creators need to adhere to.

Shonen Jump’s Weekly Schedule Continues to Be a Problem

As a manga fan, it is great to see new chapters of your favorite stories releasing each week. It’s why manga has been able to explode in popularity in the way it has done over the decades, and it’s why some of these franchise have become as big as they are today. The ability to keep up a weekly schedule continuing to drive interest for your series is needed to compete with all other kinds of entertainment being available at the same time. But through the years, fans have become more aware of the often terrible conditions each creator needs to work through in order to maintain this schedule to meet demand.

Not only have some very prominent creators like Hunter x Hunter‘s Yoshihiro Togashi gone on record about the poor state of their health (which is why there are long hiatuses in between each of the manga’s updates), but some creators have revealed how much their need to turn in a new chapter each week has also resulted in poor sleep schedules and more. Then you get cases like this sometimes where a chapter will release incomplete in the magazine itself with the creator fixing it later for the official volume release of its chapters in a few months.

What Does This Mean for Shonen Jump’s Future?

Releasing a chapter in this incomplete state isn’t the sign of the end for Kagurabachi by any means as there have been notable examples of bigger Shonen Jump franchises in the past doing the same, it’s just another result of that demanding schedule catching up to its creators. The schedule isn’t going to change any time soon, and that’s just unfortunate as fans are hoping that each of the creators would better be able to manage their health instead of putting themselves in jeopardy for their art.

It seems that Shueisha is at least trying to manage this on the macro scale as their serializations are now much shorter than they used to be in the past. Many of the newer series have come to an end within 300 chapters, and aren’t stretched out to decades long runs as seen with major releases in the past like Dragon Ball, One Piece and Naruto. This goes a long way towards helping each creator, but isn’t going to be what helps in the interim. There needs some big changes from the top on down.

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