Two Pieces Focus On Shonen Jump Move To Digital Publication I think it's clear we can file the recent announcement that the mega-successful print effort Shonen Jumpis being transformed into a digital-only publication in that folder where comics news stories go that are so big and odd that it's hard to parse exactly what they might mean in the long run -- like United abandoning syndication to Universal earlier this year. These are the kinds of stories that make you blink every so often and go, "Oh, yeah: that actually happened."
I'm only just beginning to wrap my brain around this news, and to that end both interviews are extremely helpful and should be devoured in full. My initial fears remain the same ending that reading as when I jumped into them -- that while this move reflects a more strategized pursuit of a certain kind of customer, I'm not sure that its effect on the overall market for this material won't be drastically altered. I'm not 100 percent certain that Shonen Jump really worked in a way that makes it amenable to digital publication the way it benefited from being a publication with deep reach into a variety of markets otherwise not served by comics. At any rate, this is already one of the key moves of 2012, and one that bears watching in every incremental step.
I think it's clear we can file the recent announcement that the mega-successful print effort Shonen Jump 
