Failed Shonen Jump Manga

Shonen Jump has given us some of the most storied... stories in the history of storytelling. This video's about the manga that didn't make it. Cancelled before their time... or right on time, depending.

Chapters:
0:00 Welcome to the Jump Graveyard Tour
3:35 Snake, You've Created a Time Paradox!
7:56 Grimm's Legendary Tail
12:45 My Prince and the Pauper Academia
17:41 Wishful Thinking
23:54 Gfuel Ad
25:06 Stickin it to HiFi Cluster
31:25 Nazuto



Validate me!


In the depths of his Mother's Basement, Geoff Thew creates videos analyzing the storytelling techniques of anime and video games. He has been named the number one Worst YouTube Anime Reviewer by The Top Tens.

[unknownvariable]

If the manga gets canceled, Shonen Jump should give the rights of the series back to the artist. The artist being able to go indie and keep going with a niche audience would be great for them

[amuletangeldevil]

Fun fact : Gege Akutami stated in the jujutsu fan book that the series was pretty unpopular with readers until chapters 9-10, and that if the manga had been cancelled at this point Yuji would have stayed dead After sukuna ripped his heart out.

[Timbeon]

I feel bad for Time Paradox Ghostwriter, that's a pretty textbook case of a series being pushed to the wrong audience. It could've really flourished in a seinen or josei publication, where the audience is more open to ethically dubious protagonists and more likely to appreciate its themes and ideas, but it was just never going to click with Shonen Jump's core demographic and its actual audience was unlikely to stumble across it there.

[brendanrisney]

Ah, yes, Red Hood. Sad loss. If I recall correctly, most of the problems actually stem from the fact that Grim was supposed to be the main character, but that was denied by Jump. They decided that only a young, cookie-cutter boy can be the main character and made the author change a lot of stuff to fit this. I also think that the training arc wasn't supposed to be there, because, you know, the main character was already a hunter, which probably hurt its chances as well.
I also don't know if that ending was as much planned from the start as much as it was a bit of a "fuck you" to Jump, considering the context.

[sammulhall]

Time Paradox Ghostwriter is so fascinating to me because you see in each chapter how the mangaka tries to course-correct to avoid the chopping block, and in doing so it effectively turned into a meta-commentary about its own cancellation.

[zackbrangen]

20:00 I need to correct a misunderstanding about Zombie Powder,

The Manga wasn't cancelled, Kubo ended the manga due to having family issues.

[thedapperdolphin]

“You can’t build a career as an artist unless you know your audience and how to give them what they want.”

I thought this was going to transition into an ad read. “And I know that my audience wants more g-fuel advertising.”

[johnoneil]

I am still very sad about Red Hood getting cut so short. I really dug that world and characters. You don´t get many manga about Western fairy tales so I was really bummed out to see it get so compressed and then ended when there was a lot of potential. And I am not just saying that becaue I want Debonaire to hug me until I melt.

[theuserofthissite]

I can't believe the line "What's become of this country? So much for globalization..." came from a real, published manga and not a parody of a right wing political cartoon. Like that's the exact kind of line you'd see as a meme next to a picture of a dude dressed in a catgirl maid outfit or something.

[SimplySwayze]

Man, the story was already set in a dystopian cyberpunk wasteland; all the author of Tokyo Shinobi Squad had to do was write Tokyo as one of the last few habitable zones left after we screwed over the rest of the planet and nobody would've so much as _blinked._

But no, instead we got 'yucky crime foreigners'.

Amazing.

[KRDiStort]

I remember when Doron Dororon suddenly lurched into a war arc with little-to-no leadup, I said to myself "oh yeah, it's getting cancelled." Lo and behold, war ends, rest in peace. A sudden war arc is like one of the harbingers of the axe.

[ThatguyLouis-mcdt]

Zombie Powder ended because Kubo's best friend/family member committed suicide, shortly after Kubo fell into a huge cycle of depression and didn't want to continue the manga due to his negative state of mind he was in at the time 😢💔🙏

[justinbuergi]

Really loved Barrage and was so bummed when it got cancelled
I did a double take when I recognized the lizard monster from it in MHA

[GippyHappy]

"Looks like if Bakugou grew up to be Aizawa"
What a terrifying sentence

[studirobb]

the loss of Act-Age broke my heart....though i certainly don't disagree with the reason it was dropped. i do hope that the artist of the series, Shiro Usazaki-sensei, finds a home someday, as she was innocent from Pedo-san's misdeeds and deserves a vehicle worthy of her mighty sketching abilities.

[analystduelist]

A heads up to the Red Hood fans in case you didn't know, physical volumes in English for the manga are being released. First volume in December and all 3 volumes will contain extras for the fans.

[TrentRyanKatzenberger]

Famous fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson perfectly describes what happened to Red Hood as giving the wrong promises.

He has a very similar story where one of his friends from college wrote an incredibly good book but as somebody who's very familiar with fantasy he got bored of it like halfway through. He told his friend, oh well, it's very well written but it's just not for me and when he was asked why he told his friend that it was just a bit too generic.

His friend got really bummed out and said no you don't understand that is what I'm doing: three quarters of the way through everything gets flipped on its head and you see that it's all totally different and I'm actually subverting the typical fantasy tropes and doing a really cool meta exploration of it all!

The problem was there was nothing to indicate that in the first part of the book. So, if you're actually a person who really likes typical fantasy tropes or your a younger reader who's not so familiar with them that you find them boring when you get to the late game twist, you end up like "what!? I thought this was like this, but now it's all this awful, weird stuff?" or if you're somebody who's read a billion fantasy books and you find all that stuff kind of boring or childish, you have nothing to hold on to during the first part because the book is telling you it's going to be a typical sort of boring fantasy story.

If you're writing a story like Red Hood or Brandon Sanderson's friend, what you need to do is plant some stuff earlier in the story, give some foreshadowing, hang a lantern on your tropes (this means to point out that you, as the author, are aware that it looks a certain way but there is an explanation and you will get back to it eventually. That way, the audience can stop worrying about it). Do something to show your audience that, yes it's going to get really crazy later! This is all just set up and please bear with me.

You have to give them something to hold on to because if they're thinking it's going to be one way for most of the story and then it turns out to be another way everybody is going to be disappointed.

[Voreten]

Okay, I love this concept. If this is a pilot for a series about going through a Manga Morgue or Anime Archeology to grave rob or dig up some long dead manga concepts and see what we can lean from them, I am here for more!!

[MrZer]

If I had a nickel every time a manga had a female-male duo as heroes with the much duller male as the protagonist, I’d have…well, I’m not sure how many I would have but definitely quite a few. And I feel strongly about that in regards to Time Paradox Ghostwriter. Don’t even need to really change the characters. Just imagine the perspective being the high school girl whose rich fantasy world is suddenly in the pages of her favorite magazine! Boom! There’s a weird mystery afoot whereupon there’s a triple twist that it’s time travel, the ghostwriter isn’t a bad guy just pathetic, and also he’s desperate to bring it to conclusion as he knows she will die unexpectedly young. I think the mystery and twist angle would have drawn in young readers eager to find out what all is going on but nope. The protagonist has to be the kinda shlubby manga artists proxy, apparently. That and popping it online instead would have done it wonders

[Joenah]

I absolutely loved Hunters Guild Red Hood. It had serious potential and I'm sure it could have been one of the great epic fantasy manga. Even with the sudden sprint to the finish line, the metanarrative twist doubled as commentary on its own (and thus other short lived Jump manga's) cancelation, and I have to respect that. Getting axed must be tough, and the creative direction the mangaka took that was executed just about as good as possible.