Shonen Jump has officially launched its US version of its web shop with an exclusive collection of One Piece and Bleach merchandise.
The new online store opened on Jan. 19. Fans can now order caps, shirts, hoodies, mugs and other pieces of merchandise branded with art and manga panels from One Piece and Bleach. The store also carries goods branded with the popular manga magazine's logo. According to the website, the goods carried on the site will only be exclusively available through the store or at special events put on by Shonen Jump's American distributor, VIZ Media.
The store's opening was originally teased by the brand's official Twitter account, which cryptically announced "Soon you’ll be able to show your Shonen Jump love in a whole new way. Exciting announcement tomorrow!" on Jan. 18. Assuming the worst, many fans assumed that the magazine was getting into NFTs (non-fungible tokens), a blockchain-based verification system for digital ownership that has been widely criticized for its negative environmental impact and for adding artificial scarcity to infinitely replicable digital media. The backlash to just the possibility of Shonen Jump NFTs was so harsh that the company's official Twitter account had to finally clarify several hours later that the tease did not involve NFTs.
The Shonen Jump brand began in 1968 with the publication of the first issue of Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. In the decades since, the magazine has become a sort of kingmaker for the manga industry, as many of the biggest series of all time, including Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto and the undisputed best-selling manga series in history, Eiichiro Oda's One Piece, all got their start in the pages of the periodical. The magazine is so popular in Japan that it has spawned a number of spinoff publications, including V Jump, which hosts the serialization of popular sequel series such as Boruto: Naruto Next Generations and Dragon Ball Super. The magazine received an English version that was published in the US by VIZ Media from 2002 - 2012. While the American version of the magazine itself has ceased distribution, VIZ has continued to use the Shonen Jump branding on its English releases of titles that originally appeared in the magazine. In 2014, Shueisha launched Shonen Jump+, a digital manga service.
The manga for both One Piece and Bleach are available in English from VIZ Media. Bleach is available for streaming from Hulu, Netflix, Crunchyroll and Funimation. One Piece's anime series, which now totals over 1000 episodes, can be streamed from Funimation and Crunchyroll, while select episodes of the show are available on Hulu and Netflix.
Source: Twitter, Shonen Jump Store