Comic-Con: Shonen Jump
There were a lot of details about Viz's Shonen Jump at Comic-Con this year, including a whole panel dedicated to it. & boy did we call it. A couple months ago Viz announced that a new title would be added to the magazine starting this November. We here at the Nebs Blog took an early guess to say that the title would be the Arrancar saga of Bleach. & guess what, we were right! Bleach will begin serializing in the pages of Shonen Jump this November, & will start at the point where Ichigo & others come home from saving Rukia & wind up meeting the Vizard & Arrancar. This makes sense for a number of reasons. Bleach is a huge title in America right now, so publishing it in Shonen Jump with stories that haven't been seen in the dubbed anime yet (& wont for quite some time) is a good way for more people to buy the magazine. It's also a very strategic time to start publishing it in SJ, considering that around the same time the dub on Adult Swim will have finished up with the Soul Society saga & fans can easily jump straight to what happens next by reading it in Shonen Jump. At the same time, with the dubbed anime going into the year-long Bounto filler saga, the manga will have plenty of time to get ahead of the anime. Viz also needed to slow down their releases of the Bleach graphic novels since they were getting too close to catching up with the Japanese releases. Putting the manga in Shonen Jump is a good way to slow that down as well.
Aside from the big Bleach news, Viz also confirmed that Yu-Gi-Oh: Millennium World will be the first series to actually end in Shonen Jump (as we also predicted), with the final chapter being published in the December 2007 issue. As far as new titles go, Viz has picked up "Gun Blaze West" from Nobuhiro Watsuki, the manga-ka of Rurouni Kenshin & Busso Renkin. They've also finally picked up the classic sports manga "Slam Dunk," which originally was the only Shonen Jump title that Viz didn't have the rights to publish at first. The reason being that another manga magazine in America, Raijin Comics, licensed the title before Viz formed a permanent partnership with Shonen Jump. Rajin Comics failed after a few months, & they never finished releasing Slam Dunk. But now Viz plans to start the series over from the beginning under their label.
Speaking of Rurouni Kenshin, it'll be joining DragonBall & DragonBall Z as a new style of releasing manga. All 3 series have finished being published by Shonen Jump, but now they'll be re-released under special edition "thin-pack" like releases. They'll be released under the title "Viz Big," will be larger print graphic novels with fine paper & ink jobs, & will include 3 volumes in 1. The price for each will be $17.99, so basically they're charging the price of 2 volumes even though you're getting 3. The paperback covers will include new artwork as well. So for any fans who didn't buy these series at first, they'll now have a second & better chance to do so.
As a final note, Viz said once again that the anime version of Shonen Jump's Death Note would "be a good fit" for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block, & hope to work out a deal to air it there. Despite the fact that the series has already been announced to air in Canada on YTV, nothing of the such has happened for Adult Swim yet.
Source: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/convention/2007/comic-con-international