Manga Sells All Over the World. So Why Are Manga Artists Still Pulling All-Nighters? The Seven-Day Clock of Weekly Serialization

Key Points

• A weekly manga chapter in Japan runs about 19 pages. Meeting with the editor, drawing the storyboard, inking and finishing all have to be done within seven days, and the next week’s cycle starts immediately. There’s almost no slack: a single cold can wipe out a week’s margin.
• Most of the page rates paid by magazines go to studio and assistant costs, and artists often just break even. Their real income comes from royalties of about 10% to 15% on collected volumes and digital editions, and only if the series sells. So first they have to protect the serialization by hitting the deadline every week.
• Japan’s manga market hit a record 704.3 billion yen in 2024, but manga magazines accounted for only 44.9 billion yen, about 6%. Most of the money now comes from digital and collected editions, yet the rhythm of serialization still runs on the weekly magazine’s clock.
• The clock is loosening. In 2021, Jujutsu Kaisen’s editors proposed a hiatus themselves. In 2024, One Piece’s creator called his break “maintenance” for his body. Digital drawing lets some artists sleep seven hours a night. The weekly rhythm remains, but all-nighters are no longer its necessary price.

In March 2024, Weekly Shonen Jump announced that One Piece would go on a three-week break starting with issue 18, on sale April 1. Its creator, Eiichiro Oda, wrote in the notice, “Taking a break!” Then, as if worried readers might fret, he added: “I’m not sick. It is about my body, but please think of it as maintenance.”

Just weeks earlier, Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama had died of illness. Oda made a point of saying he wasn’t sick so readers wouldn’t worry. But the whole thing is a little strange. In 2022, One Piece announced that it had passed 500 million copies in circulation worldwide, making it one of the best-selling manga in history. The person who draws it wants three weeks off, and still has to explain himself to readers first.

Japanese manga has never made this much money. In 2024, Japan’s manga market was estimated at 704.3 billion yen in sales, its seventh straight year of growth. Anime, translations and manga apps have carried Japanese manga to every corner of the world. With more money and more readers than ever, why are manga artists still racing deadlines, pulling all-nighters, and apologizing before they take a break?

The answer lies in two things: how money reaches manga artists, and a clock set more than 60 years ago that goes around once every seven days.

Nineteen pages a week: seven days in the life of a weekly manga artist

First, let’s see what one turn of the clock looks like.

Taishi Tsutsui, who serialized We Never Learn (Bokutachi wa Benkyo ga Dekinai) in Weekly Shonen Jump, once laid out his week on Shueisha’s website for aspiring manga artists. Each chapter was 19 pages. His week went like this:

Thursday: a meeting with his tantou editor to discuss the next chapter. A tantou is the dedicated editor a publisher assigns to each manga artist, who helps develop the story, tracks progress and chases manuscripts.

Friday at noon, he starts the “name,” the storyboard. The name is the blueprint of a manga chapter: how each page is divided into panels, where characters stand, what they say. It’s drawn roughly, but the pacing and the jokes of the whole chapter are settled at this stage. He works until late at night and hands it to his editor. By Saturday evening the revisions are done, and he immediately starts inking, turning the pencil sketches into final lines, finishing five pages that day.

On Sunday and Monday he inks seven pages each. From Monday to Wednesday, assistants come into the studio to do the finishing work: backgrounds, screentone and spot blacks. On Wednesday evening Tsutsui joins them for the final touches, and the manuscript is done. The next day, Thursday, is the meeting for the following chapter.

The scariest thing about this schedule is that it has no gaps. Tsutsui says of the storyboard, “If you can’t draw it, it’s over, so not being able to draw it isn’t an option.” While working on the storyboard for chapter 4 of his series he caught the flu and ran a fever of 40 degrees Celsius. He had to recover before he could think about the story, and used up the margin he’d built into his schedule to catch up. One illness can eat the whole buffer.

Tsutsui’s rule is “never make my editor chase me,” and he never missed a deadline. Even for someone that punctual, the schedule has no free day. Once the storyboard stalls, the body gives out, or the story needs more thought, the only thing left to sacrifice is sleep.

Editors waiting with folding beds: how the clock started

The weekly manga clock was set by magazines.

On March 17, 1959, Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine and Shogakukan’s Weekly Shonen Sunday launched on the same day. Before that, boys’ manga in Japan appeared mainly in monthly magazines. Weekly magazines turned an artist’s deadline from once a month into once a week. A magazine has a fixed release date and the printer has fixed press times. If a manuscript is a day late, the whole issue can’t go out.

The most famous story about this clock involves Osamu Tezuka, the “god of manga.” In the 1980s, Tezuka serialized Adolf (Adolf ni Tsugu) in the magazine Shukan Bunshun, 10 pages a week. His editor, Mikio Ikeda, recalled years later that the deadline was Friday, but he “almost never once” got the pages on a Friday. They often dragged into Saturday or Sunday.

To wait for pages, Ikeda would move into Tezuka Productions, Tezuka’s studio, every Thursday. “Staying three nights and four days was routine.” The studio kept an “overnight kit” shared by editors from different publishers: changes of clothes, towels, toothbrushes, and a folding beach chair. Editors would wait at an empty desk while working on other manuscripts they were responsible for.

Tezuka was also drawing Hidamari no Ki and Buddha for other magazines at the same time, and every editor was waiting. Ikeda’s boss told him, “Even if you draw it yourself, just bring something back.” He ended up fudging his progress reports, saying he had six pages when he had only received four.

It sounds like a joke today, but it shows something: the speed of weekly serialization was set by how often magazines came out. How fast an artist could draw was never part of the calculation.

Page rates only keep the studio running; the real money waits for the collected volumes

If the clock spins this fast, why don’t manga artists just slow down? Because the way money flows won’t let them stop.

Manga artists have two main sources of income. The first is the page rate the magazine pays. In November 2023, Weekly Shonen Jump took the rare step of publishing its rates: black-and-white pages started at 18,700 yen, rising to 20,900 yen in 2024. Takeshi Okano, a manga artist who debuted in Jump, saw the numbers and said he’d started at 10,000 yen a page: “So it doubled in 30 years.”

That sounds like a lot, but the page rate isn’t the artist’s personal salary. The weekly workload usually means hiring assistants, and the artist pays their wages, the studio rent and equipment costs. A weekly manga artist is really the owner of a small company, and the page rate is that company’s revenue.

Shuho Sato, known for Umizaru, once shared his own numbers from when he was serializing Tokko no Shima in a weekly magazine: 30,000 yen a page, about 40 pages a month, for monthly income of 1.2 million yen. But he had three employees, and after paying for the studio and staff, the page rates were almost entirely gone. He roughly broke even.

So how do manga artists make money? Through the second source of income: royalties. When a serialization is collected into tankobon, or collected volumes, the artist receives about 10% of the cover price. Sato said each volume of Tokko no Shima sold about 100,000 copies, earning roughly 6 million yen in royalties, with two volumes a year. Digital royalties can be higher: Ryoma Kitada, creator of SUPER HXEROS, has shared that his print royalty is 10% and his digital royalty 15%.

That’s the economic reason for the all-nighters. The page rates earned from each week’s pages barely keep the studio running. The real income only arrives once the work is collected into books, and only if those books sell well. Collected volumes depend on the serialization building up content and popularity, and the serialization depends on hitting the deadline every week. At a magazine like Jump, series that aren’t popular enough get cancelled early. So manga artists are essentially paying in advance with their own time and health, betting that the series will one day be a hit.

Readers around the world really have brought in a lot of money. But that money flows through collected volumes, digital editions and anime, and it is concentrated in a small number of hits. For a new series that has just started, no matter how big the global market is, what’s in front of the artist is next Thursday’s meeting.

Magazines are 6% of the market, but the clock still runs on magazine time

Here’s the odd part: the magazines that set this clock are no longer manga’s main source of revenue.

Of the 704.3 billion yen in Japan’s manga market in 2024, digital manga made up 512.2 billion yen and print collected volumes 147.2 billion yen. Manga magazines were down to 44.9 billion yen, about 6%. Print runs for Weekly Shonen Magazine and Weekly Shonen Sunday fell to less than half in six years.

Readers no longer rush to the bookstore for the magazine every week. They read on their phones, or wait for the collected volume and read it all at once. That changes what a break means. One working manga editor once admitted, “Manga readers today don’t read magazines, right? So honestly, skipping an issue isn’t a big deal.” He also said there are fewer editors now who will push an artist to the limit to get pages.

In the days when the magazine was the only outlet, a week off meant readers had a week’s less to read. But when most readers follow the story in collected volumes or apps, a one-week gap is invisible in the book.

Breaks have gone from “dropping the ball” to part of the job

This shift shows most clearly in some of the biggest series of recent years.

In June 2021, Jujutsu Kaisen announced a hiatus because its creator, Gege Akutami, was unwell. What surprised readers was the editorial department’s explanation: the break was the editors’ idea. Akutami wanted to keep going, but after talking it over, the editors and the author decided a period of rest to recover would be better. Akutami explained that at first they didn’t agree, wanting to finish the story quickly, but accepted because the schedule had already slipped and a single week off wouldn’t be enough to catch up. Akutami also said they had “no major illness, and mentally I’m perfectly fine,” and would come back “treating it like a brand-new series.”

At the time, the Jujutsu Kaisen anime had just finished its first season. It was the series’ most popular moment, exactly when, in the past, an artist would have been least likely to be given a break.

Three years later, Eiichiro Oda described his own hiatus as “maintenance.” Maintenance is something you do regularly, not something you wait to do until things break.

Digital tools are also helping manga artists win back their sleep. Hiro Mashima, creator of Fairy Tail, says that when he was young he got up at 10 a.m. and worked straight through to 3 a.m., doing almost nothing but drawing apart from eating and bathing. It was an era when “finish it even if you have to stay up all night” was taken for granted. After switching to digital, his speed went up dramatically. He now draws about a page an hour, five pages a day on average, and keeps a habit of sleeping seven hours a night. His assistants now work remotely from home, and he sees them in person once every two or three months.

Yasuki Tanaka, who serialized Summer Time Rendering on the Shonen Jump+ manga app, drew a weekly series alone without assistants and spent weekends with his family. His editor says he never once asked, “Can I hand it in tomorrow?” Tanaka says he learned this way of working from Hirohiko Araki, creator of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. When Tanaka was Araki’s assistant, the studio started at 10 a.m. and finished at 9 p.m., and “Araki-sensei never pulls all-nighters.”

The clock won’t disappear, but it shouldn’t run on lost sleep

So will weekly serialization simply disappear? Probably not. One chapter a week, a cliffhanger at the end, readers in the habit of coming back every week, and a series that gets talked about every week: that’s how manga holds onto readers. The rhythm has even spread worldwide. In January 2019, Shueisha launched MANGA Plus, a manga app for overseas readers, where ongoing series appear in English and Spanish on the same day they update in Japan. Now readers all over the world are waiting on the same clock.

So I think the answer to “why are they still pulling all-nighters” has two layers. One is money: page rates only keep the studio going, and royalties only come once a series succeeds. The other is the clock: the weekly rhythm was designed for an era when readers bought a magazine every week, and although magazines are now 6% of the market, the rhythm has stayed.

Manga artists don’t stay up all night because Japanese manga doesn’t make money. They do it because the money arrives late while the clock spins fast. The cliffhangers and buzz of weekly serialization are worth keeping, but what made One Piece popular is its story, not the hours of sleep its creator gave up. After Eiichiro Oda took three weeks off, One Piece carried on. Hiro Mashima sleeps seven hours a night and still draws a weekly series.

More than 60 years ago, editors moved into manga artists’ studios with folding beach chairs to wait for pages. Today, the most popular manga artist can write “please think of it as maintenance” in an announcement, and editors may suggest a break themselves. The clock is still turning. It’s just that the cost of each turn no longer has to be paid entirely in the artist’s sleep.

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Notes

1. Taishi Tsutsui’s weekly schedule is how he described working during his serialization in an interview on Shueisha’s Jump Manga Award website. Schedules vary widely from artist to artist.
2. Shuho Sato’s page rate and royalty figures are his own account from when Tokko no Shima was serialized in Weekly Manga TIMES (early 2010s). Royalties vary by work, publisher and contract.
3. The Jump page rates published in 2023 and 2024 are minimums. Actual rates are adjusted according to the artist’s experience and the series’ popularity.
4. The 2024 manga market figures are estimates by the Research Institute for Publications.
5. “Skipping an issue isn’t a big deal” comes from an unnamed working manga editor and represents a personal view.
6. At the time, Hirohiko Araki was serializing Steel Ball Run in the monthly magazine Ultra Jump, where deadline pressure is lighter than for a weekly. Yasuki Tanaka applied the same routine to a weekly serialization.

References

1. Dengeki Online｜漫画『ワンピース』が4月1日発売の少年ジャンプ18号から20号まで3週休載｜2024-03 (One Piece’s three-week hiatus and Eiichiro Oda’s announcement)
2. Anime Corner｜One Piece Manga Officially Exceeds 500 Million Circulating Copies｜2022-08-05 (500 million copies worldwide)
3. nippon.com｜日本のコミック市場：2024年の販売額（推定）は過去最高の7043億円｜2025 (market size, digital, collected volumes and magazine sales)
4. Jump Manga Award (Shueisha)｜筒井大志先生インタビュー 第4回 色々と描いてきたことが今に繋がっている (weekly schedule, the flu, the rule of never missing a deadline)
5. nippon.com｜3月17日 漫画週刊誌の日 (Magazine and Sunday launched on the same day in 1959)
6. Bunshun Online｜Interview with Mikio Ikeda, editor of Tezuka’s Adolf｜2020 (the deadline, staying three nights, the overnight kit and folding chair, fudged progress)
7. J-CAST News｜少年ジャンプが原稿料アップ公表、モノクロ1ページ2200円増｜2024-11 (Jump’s published page rates, Takeshi Okano’s comment)
8. Livedoor News (Urepia)｜【漫画家のリアルな経済事情】『海猿』の原作者にはいくら入るのか、佐藤秀峰本人に聞いた (page rates, staff, royalties in his own words)
9. Otaku USA Magazine｜Manga Creator Shows How Manga Earnings Work (Ryoma Kitada’s print and digital royalty rates)
10. Real Sound｜漫画雑誌の「休載」が問題視されなくなった理由｜2023-01 (a working editor’s view of hiatuses)
11. J-CAST News｜「呪術廻戦」作者の体調不良で休載へ 実はジャンプ編集部が打診｜2021-06-10 (the editors proposed the hiatus, Gege Akutami’s explanation)
12. Gendai Business｜週刊連載漫画家のハードワークを支える「いいひといき」…真島ヒロインタビュー (Hiro Mashima’s routine, digital drawing, remote assistants)
13. Livedoor News｜#担当とわたし『サマータイムレンダ』田中靖規×担当編集｜2021 (Yasuki Tanaka’s way of working, hours at Hirohiko Araki’s studio)
14. Impress Watch｜集英社、海外向けマンガアプリ「MANGA Plus」｜2019-01 (launched January 28, 2019, simultaneous release with Japan)