Depending how dedicated you are, you can totally catch up with most of the biggest series in a month or two. Jujutsu Kaisen has over 160 chapters and counting. The immortal One Piece is over 1,000 chapters at this point. The current run of Chainsaw Man is only 97 chapters total. There are some limitations here, the biggest one being that you can only read 100 chapters a day, but that’s more than enough. Shonen Jump on the App Store Screenshot: Samuel Polay / Inputįor $2 a month, you can read the entire Shonen library more or less on both iOS and Android, promising more than 10,000 chapters. Current mega-hits like My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, and Jujutsu Kaisen are also Shonen titles. The big three anime that reigned in the mid-2000s: Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece all started as weekly Shonen Jump titles. No other platform has launched as many iconic series as Shonen Jump. For the uninitiated, Shonen Jump is a legendary weekly and monthly magazine that is the holy grail of manga publications. Then, I remembered that Shonen Jump had launched a digital subscription almost three years ago. Digital versions of each volume go for $7 in apps like Amazon-owned Comixology. A good price to check out the first volume of chapters, but pretty expensive to be completionist. The Chainsaw Man manga is currently at seven volumes, fetching $10 a pop from my favorite non-monopolist book chain. The first thing to consider when jumping into manga is, of course, the printed manga volumes. Dedicated anime streamers like Crunchyroll, Funimation, or HiDive have never once charged my credit card. I’ll watch a series if it’s available on Netflix, Hulu, or HBO Max, but if I have to break out of my service bubble to find the hot new show, I usually pass. I’m what anime diehards (self-identified “otaku”) lovingly call a “filthy casual”. I hadn’t read manga in years but had always kept a toe in the anime world that manga spawned. A few months ago, the hype for the upcoming Chainsaw Man anime from studio Mappa finally got to me.Įager to know why every anime-influencer I follow was foaming at the mouth for this series, I started searching for the most economical ways to acquire its manga before the adaptation started airing.