In the mid-2000s, shonen fans started putting on airs with the creation of the Big Three: Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto, Tite Kubo’s Bleach, and Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece. The three manga coexisted and ran on Shonen Jump Magazine in the same timeframe, became famous for their worldwide popularity and length, and were prominently featured on covers. They weren’t the magazine’s biggest sellers, but they were the ones people knew about, largely thanks to their equally big anime adaptations.
Years later, manga fans have tried glomming onto present day series in the hopes of crowning a new Big Three. For the shonen folk, the attempted successors in recent years have been Kōhei Horikoshi’s superhero epic My Hero Academia and Gege Akutami’s action-horror series Jujutsu Kaisen. Like the legendary trio before them, both are linked together by existing and gaining in popularity during the same timeframe, and also ending in proximity to one another: Horikoshi closed the book on My Hero this past August, while Jujutsu’s last chapter will drop on September 30. When all is said and done, have either of these two truly earn the vaunted status heaped upon them by their respective communities? Well…no, not really.
That’s not to say either are bad; I enjoyed reading and watching what I did of both over the years. At their best, they’re both compelling stories that provide a fun spin on the specific genre tropes they’re playing with, and you can see why they were picked up to be adapted into anime. When experienced in the proper way, their individual highs can be high. (The second My Hero movie, 2019’s Heroes Rising, has some thrilling, incredibly bonkers stuff going on.) But their respective come-ups aren’t fully surprising, lightning-in-a-bottle moments as their predecessors, and that’s a big reason why they can’t really be anything more than a pair of mostly good shonen stories that could probably cut a quarter of their length and be stronger for it.
When you get down to it, My Hero Academia just rode the rising superhero wave of the 2010s that took off alongside the MCU, and tapped into the (largely) timeless “young superhero” market that Marvel and DC weren’t fully embracing after Young Justice went off the air first time. In the nicest way possible, it is the Japan equivalent to Sky High from nearly two full decades ago. Jujutsu Kaisen is in a similar boat: horror doesn’t really go out of style, and there’ve been well-regarded series like Tokyo Ghoul and Attack on Titan that helped lay the groundwork. (Anime-wise, both it and Titan were adapted by animation studio MAPPA, which definitely played a hand in things as well.) In the same way you can tell Horikoshi loves him some cape comics, it can be easy to spot what influenced Akutami, like Hunter x Hunter, Bleach, and Naruto. The Big Three of the 2000s had their own individual influences, but they were also trendsetters that went on to inspire future creators in clear and direct ways.
Can the same be said of either My Hero or Jujutsu that couldn’t be broadly applied to the genres they belong to? No doubt these are popular series, as made clear by the merchandise and arena fighters churned out by Bandai Namco, but in an age where anything can or wants to be a franchise, that doesn’t mean much the way it did 20 years ago. And yeah, you’ll get a Gojo reference in a Miles Morales comic or Megan Thee Stallion single, but what kind of legacy will these two manga leave behind? What would the next generation take away from the stories of Deku Midoriya and Yuji Itadori that is unique to them?
The thing about the Big Three is that it was a unique, focused moment in time that can’t really exist anymore. It came about through a convergence of many factors, one of which is the shonen medium being big enough, but not so big that things could easily get lost in the shuffle. It’s a problem with our current media landscape more broadly; how often do people talk about not knowing a thing exists until it’s incredibly close to release or flopped because it failed to find an audience? Under different circumstances, it’s easy to imagine either My Hero or Jujutsu get overlooked and end prematurely if something else caught fans’ eye. That’s not really the case with Bleach, Naruto, or One Piece, and much of that can be owed to Cartoon Network’s Toonami block and Fox’s 4KidsTV in the mid-2000s. One Piece premiered on the latter in 2004, then jumped ship to Toonami in 2005 (the same year Naruto started airing), followed by Bleach in 2006. The two networks did a lot of heavy lifting in the west to help them become the juggernauts they are. Conversely, My Hero is the only of these two modern anime to air on actual television instead of just getting weekly Crunchyroll drops and then heading to DVD or another streamer.
So much of this current shonen boom is tangled up in time: My Hero Academia began in 2014 as manga and anime were starting to become more popular here in the west. By the time Jujutsu Kaisen arrived on the scene in 2018, the west started to openly embrace both formats. Bookstores started building out their manga stock and making it more prominent, while anime was spreading from Crunchyroll to Netflix and other streamers, to say nothing of frequent theatrical showings for big movies like Promare and Demon Slayer. My Hero and Jujutsu are popular in Japan, but outside their home country (and the US in particular), they were practically a revelation, further helped by becoming easier to access, legally or otherwise.
If there’s any impact My Hero and Jujutsu’s did have unique to them, it’s that they helped the leak community blow up. On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Twitter leakers would reveal the events of the forthcoming chapter that would hit Shonen Jump on Sundays, providing screenshots and page-by-page summaries. These became events unto themselves, and if you didn’t want to be spoiled, the internet would basically tell you them’s the breaks. Major plot and character turns for both series were spoiled just days in advance, and would get trending immediately once a big moment had been posted. This was such an epidemic that a pair of shonen leakers over in Japan were arrested back in February, prompting some to back off for a bit while the heat died down, but no doubt they’ll return and turn their attention to other, ongoing series.
Again, neither My Hero Academia or Jujutsu Kaisen are bad; even when they’re getting too up their own asses. But the shonen community’s done more harm than good in trying to position them as on par with a trio of manga that have largely managed to endure to this day, and which firmly embedded themselves in history for the medium and animation at large. But there’s nothing wrong with being perfectly solid material; in fact, I’d say both series ultimately wind up there overall. Sometimes, it’s fine not to be the very best.
But if you’re a power scaler who absolutely needs to prop up something as the second coming…well, it appears Kagurabachi is right there and ready for glazing.
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