Charting Jump, December 2018


We are already over a week into 2019, but let go back in time a little and look at the monthly performance for the final batch of Jump Comics in 2018. ( yes I know I skipped November, I was busy)

Without wasting more time, first up is the Monthly sales overview.


Series Week 0 Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Monthly
One Piece 91 3935 1510524 287458 112446 79443 1993806
My Hero Academia 21 437 389393 112443 53407 37255 592935
Haikyuu!! 35 932 367896 103614 47635 33297 553374
World Trigger 19 356 238990 53268 22555 16738 331907
Shokugeki no Soma 32 198 161174 48409 21057 13957 244795
Jujutsu Kaisen 3 83100 19043 10138 8139 120420
We Never Learn 9 72305 19332 - - 108155¹
Jujutsu Kaisen 0 70774 13877 - - 99155¹
Dr. Stone 8 59929 16670 - - 91519¹
Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san 13 53159 14729 - - 67888²
Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san 13 LE 10040 - - - 10040²
Hinomaru Zumou 23 23744 - - - 23744²
Invade You! 3 OOB



¹Monthly total but some weeks individual number were not available
² Yuuna number is only known up to 2 weeks while Yuuna LE (Limited edition) & Zumou number are only known for the first week.

For your information, this batch was a 6 days First Week(FW), so certain larger series had a week 0 sales which were sales from before they are officially out. This mostly happen only for the big series and usually on a 6/7 days FW.

Charts for Table above. (One Piece is the horizontal red bar)


One Piece 91 had such a huge gap to the second place (MHA 21) series that a normal chart wouldn't work. It  sold almost as much all the other series for this batch combined. This month's batch in particular was quite a big lineup in terms of sales, with most of the volumes actually charting except for Invade You! which was already cancelled a long time ago at this point.


I'll get into more detail on each volume's performance in a bit, but let's take a look at the Daily POS rankings for December first.


      POS daily ranking is basically the ranking from the POS system in Japan which tracked the daily physical sales from multiple store, there are no numbers given for the daily, so these are only relative positions and should not be used to directly compare between different month.

There were no major anomaly in the POS daily ranking for December (except for Jujutsu #0), Series decline in positions day by day with minor bumps during the weekend (as per Jump usual) and dip when a new batch of volumes were release from the other labels and publisher (most noticeable starting on the 3rd week where Magazine,Sunday, Young Jump new volumes were released on Dec 16th, 17, & 18th, respectively)

The leaders of the pack (OP/MHA/HQ/WT/SnS) maintain an almost consistent relative position from each other, while the middle rankings (JJK3/JJK0/WNL/DS/Yuuna) were very chaotic, changing position every now and then.

Every volume except for Zumou and Invade You manage to stay in the ranks for the whole month an with decent positions overall. Invade You! final volume only manage to stay in the 500 rankings for 2 days, while Zumou had 26 days before dropping of the ranks.

A noticeable bump in the ranks for all of the volume was  seen on day 22/23 which coincide with Jump Festa, and another bump can be seen after Christmas with most of the series maintaining momentum until the New Year.

Now with all of those out of the way, time for a slightly in-depth look at the individual volumes.
(Click on the images to see a bigger picture)


One Piece #91
The cover marks the beginning of The Wano Arc, It is also the first cover where all the Straw Hats (sans Jinbe) are featured since Vol. 64 (which had Jinbe) 

 


Vol. 91 actually show a slight improvement since the previous 2 volume, It pretty much match the pacing OP have been showing since a while now, It may not had reach 2 million copies in the first 4 weeks, but I still considered it as making 2M within a month. we'll see if it can keep up this momentum going into the anime's 20th anniversary and also the upcoming movie later this year.


A bigger picture for OP past performance




 My Hero Academia #21
Endeavor and Hawks are the highlights for this volume cover as they are the main focus in this volume's story, I like how the cover incorporates Endeavor's flame and Hawks wing and merge them to create a cool visual.



MHA first volume after season 3 ended, It had a slightly better debut compared to Vol. 20 but paced a bit slowly going forward, the overall growth could basically be considered flat, but thanks to the holiday season it manage the end slightly ahead of volume 20.

The gap until Season 4 is bigger than usual, so we will see if the lack of anime could affect the sales performance, Vol. 22 is expected to come in February, and it will also have the same 6 days FW, so we can make a better comparison and assessment then.



Haikyuu!! #35
Kenma took the cover for this volume, is the cat looking inside the cage from the outside or vice versa?




HQ 35 still showing a bit of decline in sales, but I considered it to have a reach a stable state, It trailed the past volumes but at a pretty close pacing.it also had quite a strong week 4 again thanks to the holiday seasons.

With a new anime project announced for 2019. let see if that could build some hype for some people to return to series, It will be interesting to see if it could build momentum early from the hype or do wee need to wait for the project to actually started.


A broader look at Haikyuu past volumes


World Trigger #19
Ko took centre spot for World Trigger vol. 19, we get to see a bit of his black blade kogetsu (not a black trigger) and in the background are the major players for this round of Rank Wars.





World Trigger returns after almost 2 years of absence, and it returns with a bang, easily the fastest selling volume of the the series, which very noticeable when we look at the charts. It started a lot stronger and its pacing throughout the month had been really good.

Now to wait for the next volume to see if it could maintain this level of performance or this time was mainly from the hype of it returning from a long hiatus.



Shokugeki no Souma #32
Asahi's debut volume have him in between Soma and Erina, The facial expressions of the characters kinda reflect each other 




Souma continues it descend with the latest volume not only dropping from the previous volume but also poor legs in the following weeks, performing considerably worse than even what it did pre-anime

It doesn't seem to reach a baseline for it's sales yet, future volume will tell if it already at the end of it descend or if there are still a bit more to go.

Broader look at the past volumes performance



Jujutsu Kaisen #3 & Jujutsu Kaisen #0
 
Nobari complete's the 1st year trio by taking volume  3's cover while Yuta & Rika are on Vol. 0's cover reflecting their main role in the prologue volume.


      2018 breakout hit Jujutsu Kaisen closes the year with a show of strength, Volume 3 of Jujutsu already outperformed the latest volume from both WNL and Stone. It managed to made in a single week, what the previous volume took almost a month to do. Volume 0 (prequel series that ran in Giga before the weekly serialization) also manage to sell more than Dr. Stone latest volume. 2019 just started but we will be seeing more of Jujutsu and it will interesting if it can keep up the momentum. 


No line chart since it doesn't really show anything just yet, but here is something else that you might find intriguing, 


Jujutsu Kaisen Vol. 3 was always consistently ahead of Vol. 0 but suddenly on the 4th week it jumped ahead a stay at that position until the end of the month. a possible explanation could be that JJK 0 had a considerably lower initial print than JJK 3 and so when the reprints for both of them hit the shelves, JJK which was selling less before had the opportunity to overtake JJK 3 for the time being.



We Never Learn #9
Rizu & Sekijou (& Hami-chan) is relaxing & studying on the cover





WNL #9 still managed to do slightly better than the previous volume, it started a bit better a maintain the pacing the end up just slightly ahead of the previous volume. 

It might still have room to grow but we might be seeing the peak of it's pre-anime sells,


Dr. Stone #8
The sneaky duo, Senku and Gen aboard the main invention of the volume



Dr. Stone like it's namesake is behaving like stone, staying still letting others series past it, the latest volume manage to debut a bit higher than the previous volume, but it paced slower and by the end of the month, even with the holiday season still behind the previous volumes.

Dr. Stone is a series with potential, if the anime in the summer could bring more eyes to it, it could in theory be able to perform better, in theory that is.



Yuragi-sou no Yuuna San #13
Yaya and Shion on the cover of volume 13 even though they don't really do anything in this volume




Yuuna is one of the two series that had anime recently, but it doesn't help the manga sales in the slightest, yes I do omitted the LE in the charts but that usually doesn't have too much of an effect and Yuuna have had 2 volumes with an LE back to back and still showed drop.

Yuuna is a series that started strong but didn't managed retained its fans to return and buy newer volumes, with newer volumes performing worse and worse.



Hinomaru Zumou #22
Ushio in his path to destruction state, which was the major plot point for this volume.
The second series with an anime recently and that is HZ, the anime is still running at the moment, but it doesn't even have a minor impact on the manga sales whatsoever, no backlogs appeared in POS and the manga still failed to truly break out of the 30k club.

The series seemed to be reaching a natural end, but you can never really tell with this series




Invade You! #3 (END)
Goodbye I guess?, I only recognize the MC

I don't really know what to say actually, it only charted in the POS daily for 2 days and it never charted on Oricon, I'll just leave you with this, the book-rank estimate for week 1 of this volume is just 787 copies.