WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Chapter 1 of Time Paradox Ghostwriter, by Kenji Ichima, Tsunehiro Date, Stephen Paul and Snir Aharon, available in English from Viz Media.
After a recent wave of weirder and weirder titles gracing the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump, it only stands to reason that the magazine would also start getting seriously meta. In the same issue that the enormously successful Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba concludes, Time Paradox Ghostwriter begins. And readers of the iconic manga magazine couldn't ask for a more extreme changing of the guard: one, your standard, shonen battle series; the other, a fourth wall-encroaching sci-fi that uses the trials and tribulations of getting your foot in the door of Jump's publisher as its subject matter.
In its debut chapter, Time Paradox Ghostwriter finds aspiring mangaka Sasaki Teppei pleading his case to non-plussed Jump editor, Kikuse, over and over. Having attended a specialist manga art school and won a Runner-Up prize in the magazine's rookie contest, all that stands between Sasaki and making his professional debut with a published one-shot is Kikuse's approval. Unfortunately, his by-the-book storyboards aren't earning him any traction. The editor's main complaint is that his ideas are too "normal." He advises the young artist to look inside himself and "draw something only you can draw." It's hard to know for sure, but given the heavily self-referential nature of Time Ghost Paradox Ghostwriter and that the quote is verbatim, this could well be a nod to One Piece's Eiichiro Oda's recent words of wisdom to novice creators.
Sasaki pulls an all-nighter right after this meeting to create a fresh storyboard that will tick the required boxes. But, yet again, Kikuse is completely unenthused by the graduate's effort. "The story is completely empty. There's nothing here at all." After ripping into his lack of personal perspective in his work and inability to create characters that are interesting beyond superficial quirks, Kikuse leaves Sasaki a broken man. On the floor of his apartment that he can barely cover the rent on, Sasaki yells out his intention to the heavens to quit his dream for good... and the heavens answer.
In true Frankenstein and Back to the Future style, a bolt of lightning changes Sasaki's life -- hitting his microwave and causing it to fuse with a little toy robot sitting atop it; a gift from a fellow graduate who quoted The Blue Hearts's lyric, "The future is in our hands," when he'd handed it over. At the appliance's DING!, a thoroughly creeped-out Sasaki reaches inside and pulls out a copy of Weekly Shonen Jump... from 2030. Inside it just so happens to be the thing that has alluded the young creator for so long: a hit, debut series. (If he were a Steins;gate fan, he might not be so surprised by the ordinary machine's extraordinary potential.)
After the book promptly disappears, a sleep-deprived Sasaki is left to only assume he hallucinated the whole thing but is still able to reproduce a streamlined version of the shonen "masterpiece" from the future. Lo and behold, it's warmly-received by Jump's Editor-in-Chief and hits stores a full decade before its intended publication.
Unlike all of Sasaki's original attempts, Time Paradox Ghostwriter has a timely and interesting hook with plenty of room for growth. Meta sci-fi is all the rage at the moment thanks to shows like Rick & Morty while the discovery of Sasaki's unconscious piracy by the idea's actual progenitor -- 17-year-old Itsuki Aino -- teases the possibility of some kind of time-separated communication system like The Lakehouse's magic mailbox. Oddly enough for an issue of Jump that bids farewell to Demon Slayer, Sasaki/Aino's series, White Knight, looks to be a period-set action story, leaving us to only guess at how much of Time Paradox Ghostwriter's first chapter truly is meta-commentary, and how much is just eerie coincidence.