Charting Jump February 2019

3 months is a row! ~~and I am actually early this month!~~ hope this streak can continue indefinitely. February might be the shortest month of the year, but I still have a lot to talk about the sales of Jump Series.

Like in January we have a few series that remained pretty much static Volume over Volume (VoV), but we also have some series that show movement in the charts both in a positive and negative way.

Enough with the preface and get on with the sales, First up are the monthly Oricon sales overview.

Series	Day	Week 0	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	4 Week Total
My Hero Academia 22	7	2923	383594	111282	49263	32009	579071
Haikyuu!! 36	7	6966	362225	95430	42854	27854	535329
Shokugeki no Soma 33	7	1593	139010	43200	16644	12816	213263
Boruto 7	7	1777	110424	33229	14033	11178	170641
We Never Learn 10 *	7	540	74373	18648	0	0	106921
Dr. Stone 9 *	7	650	59900	16571	0	0	91300
Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san 14 *	7	540	61518	15631	0	0	88406
Act-Age 5 *	7	374	51945	15872	0	0	82040
Hinomaru Zumou 24 **	7	358	24288	0	0	0	24646

* Week 3 & Week 4 for this series are individually unknown but the 4 weeks total/ monthly number are known

** Final number for Hinomaru Zumou is just for the 1st week
Alice & Sun Vol. 2 & 3 did not ranked

For your information, This February batch was a 7 days First Week(FW),so most series had a week 0 sales which were sales from before they are officially out.

I should start adding disclaimers to my blog as well, the numbers are all according to Oricon which is to say that (as of now) they only track the physical sale of the Japanese versions of the volumes and even then, they do not cover every retailer available.

Chart for the table above

Overall, February was fairly average month, with the majority of the batch doing as expected (great or otherwise). Most of them perform fairly well in the Oricon weekly charts with the exception of the final 2 volumes of the already cancelled Alice & Sun.

Out of the series that made the weekly charts, all but Hinomaru Zumou showed up in the monthly chart with My Hero Academia & Haikyuu!! being the clear leaders in sales for Jump series this month with each of them tracking over double the third best performer of the batch.

As always, we will take a closer look at how each series perform in comparison to their past volumes, but first, let's take a look at how the series did on the daily Shoseki rankings, this can give us a feels on how the volumes performed relatively to each other throughout the month of February. You can check the raw data for the daily rankings here.

The daily rankings for February at a glance seems to follow the normal pattern, Series declined in positions day by day with minor bumps during the weekends (as per Jump usual) and dipped whenever a new batch of volumes were released from other labels and publishers.

The middle rankers were a bit chaotic, changing relative position constantly throughout the month. And with their positions being so close to each other, it was not surprising that they all ended the month with fairly similar sales in the Oricon Chart.

A few thing to note are Alice & Sun Vol.2 and Vol.3 only ranking for 6 days before disappearing off entirely, and that Hinomaru Zumou Vol. 24 ranking 22 out of the 25 days available beginning from February 4th. There were nothing restock or outside boost can be visibly seen in the rankings.

With the overview done, time to take a closer look at each of the volumes

My Hero Academia #22

The cover for volume 22 features the key players of the battles shown in this volume, it is missing Honezuki to be perfectly honest. The black lines emerging outwards from Deku in the center is a nice touch to tie in with the reveal at the end of this volume.

MHA past 3 volumes sold about the same within a month according to Oricon. The series are currently where is not growing nor declining, the performance of this volume can be seen as lower compared to the previous volume, but it is within the range that it can just be considered as error.

MHA next volume will be on May, and with the Anime Season 4 coming later in October, it will be interesting to see if the series would maintain this performance, see a more noticeable decline or even rise within the time waiting for the anime to return, heck it might no be even a stretch to say if the anime would still have a noticeable impact on the manga sales by then.

Haikyuu!! #36

Hinata and Kenma square off for the cover, with imagery of crows, cats, the trash heap, and... knives?

I will be saying this a lot in this month post, but HQ 36 did mostly within range of what the past few volumes have done, I would say that it seemingly reached a somewhat stable position as of now, no longer showing a significant decline in the Oricon charts.

As with MHA this too are getting buzz of an anime by the end of the year (I'll be honest and say that I'm a bit confused by the wording so I'll be vague as well). I wonder if there will be any hype leading to the event in September and if it would showed up in the Oricon charts.

A bigger picture on HQ performance on Oricon

Shokugeki no Souma #33

The "light" chefs are on the cover as the Blue arc began

Souma continues its free-fall with no signs of stopping anytime soon. The latest volume is performing as well as it did pre-anime. To put it into perspective, the latest SnS Vol.33, sold less in 21 days than what Vol.3 did in 10 days.

There are semantics to be argued here with changing landscapes and consumption of manga, but I'm just sharing the numbers, and it is quite apparent with it showing such a huge difference when compared to past few volumes, the drop have been very noticeable (to the point that a few people were sharing just the Sns chart specifically)

All things considered, Souma is still a good seller in the grand scheme of things, it just that it have been performing worse as new volumes comes out, and it received almost zero effect from the anime 3rd season.

A bigger picture on SnS performance on Oricon

Boruto: Naruto Next Generations #7

Kawaki take the cover for Boruto Volume 7 as he is the main focus of this volume.

To quote Mammo on Mangahelpers, "Boruto is the Platinum End of Weekly Jump" as in a work from a popular IP / by a popular mangaka doing well in sale of the first volume but as newer volumes came out the interest seems to lessen.

Boruto still have a sizeable sale by current Jump standard, but with ever declining sales on oricon some have started speculating on whether it would remain on the main Magazine any longer, but it seems the anime still have it's following and still making TV Tokyo money, so I can see it staying around longer (in Jump or otherwise). Besides, the artist did say he want the Naruto saga to be within 100 volumes so the series has ~21 volumes left according to him.

We Never Learn #10

Mafuyu Sensei and Uruka are on the cover for volume 10 this time. It does slightly touch upon one of the Sensei's chapter in the volume, the next volume should feature Fumino as her arc that started in this volume and will concludes in volume 11.

Another series that is at a stable state is WNL, The past 3 volumes are within margin of each other (maybe 4 if we could have data for it?) and you can say that the series has reached its "Pre-Anime Limit", but seeing as the anime is less than a month away as of writing we might see some changes in the charts (or not, looks at HZ and Yuuna).

Dr. Stone #9

Dr. Stone volume 9 features the conclusion of Senku's Kingdom of Science vs. Tsukasa's Empire of Might with both of the faction leader featured on the cover.

"Like its name, Dr. Stone is unmoving" is the go to joke whenever I am discussing Dr. Stone sales, I say that the phrase have some truth to it because while it started stronger than WNL (same serialization batch) it hit a peak quite early on and have not really moved since then. While we only have monthly data since vol. 7, one could argue that it had been selling around the same numbers as early as Vol.5.

We are still a whole cour away from the Dr. Stone anime premiere, so it still have at least one more chance to show if it can grow, or will it probably be outpaced by another series, like Act-Age for example.

Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san #14

Kogarashi's Master and 6th generation Yatahagane, Ouga took the center stage for the cover of her debut volume.

It is hard to make an absolute sense of Yuuna's number since it had 3 consecutive volume with a special edition before this which took away sales from the regular edition (separated for convenience and consistency, but just add ~10k-15k to Vol.11 - 13). I would say that that even taking the special editions into consideration, Yuuna as whole is seeing a decline in sales.

The anime series seemingly had little impact on the sales or at least none that are noticeable. Yuuna was a series that started strong but didn't managed retained its fans to return and buy newer volumes.

Act-Age #5

Usazaki always delivers with another stunning cover for Act-Age, this time featuring Akira who experience a major character growth within this volume. Looking at the cyrrent pattern, we might get a group shot for the next volume.

The big "winner" in terms of growth for February was clearly Act-age Vol.5 with the latest volume outselling Vol.4 2 weeks sales (10 days) in just 1 week (7 days), and this is also the first time we got the monthly numbers for Act-Age, and it did quite close to what the above 3 series were doing,

To be fair, this volume had a number of different promotions backing it, but in the end we are just looking at the number, and with anecdotes of it selling out and out of stock, the series might still have room to grow.

Hinomaru Zumou #24

Oodenta finally get a chance to be on a cover fitting as he would be challenging the Yokozuna himself on the ring in this volume.

Hinomaru is an interesting case study where if you ask most people that follow Jump, its existence for this long without ever selling "well" (by Jump standard) it still managed to stay around in the main magazine.

The anime had literally no impact of sales to speak off (Yuuna at least had 1 or 2 backlogs on the daily rankings) and it barely managed to stay in the Shoseki ranking for the whole month, To be clear, the chart above is not a good representation of what HZ does since it makes it look like it have had it ups and down in sales, when the matter of fact is only for the first week and have different days. This chart I would say does a better job on showing how HZ as a whole have been doing.

Alice & Sun #2 & #3

I only know of the main duo on the covers, and while I kinda enjoy the aesthetic of the series, time to bid farewell to yet another short-lived Jump series.

As with other series with low volume count and were cancelled without ever making any presence in sales, I don't really have anything to say about this series, I would say that it did not do horrible for an already cancelled series with no buzz, and it at least it did noticeably better than what its serialization partner, Tanaka Seiji did.

___
And with that I am finally done with February, this is a lot later than what I expected since the March numbers will coming out really soon.

I can't really make predictions but here are some things to look out for in the March batch of Jump Volumes

Can One Piece 92 reach 2 Million in 4 weeks?
Will Neverland show a noticeable boost even with a Limited Edition?
Can Jujutsu break 100k in a week? or at least be really close to it?
Can Chainsawman shows up after the first week?
Can David do anything?

I post updates for the sales of JUMP (and others) over on my twitter (@TwtOtaku_My) on a weekly basis, I also provide early charts for the first 2 weeks on twitter. For faster sales update you can join the WSJ discord server (I can't find a permanent invite link) with all the charts for every week and more (shoseki updates, early numbers, and more charts/graphs)

Thanks you for reading, share it if you like it, and (hopefully) see you next month.