With Book Week underway and autumn nights offering the perfect backdrop for uninterrupted reading, serialized manga often leaves fans hanging on every chapter. To capture this sentiment, the Japanese pop-culture outlet Anime! Anime! recently conducted a reader survey asking fans to name the ongoing manga whose continuation they are most desperate to read.
Conducted from October 9 to October 15, the poll drew an evenly split demographic, with teenagers and thirty-somethings each making up roughly 30 percent of the respondents. Three monumental titles captured the number one spot, each securing about 7 percent of the total vote: Yoshihiro Togashi's HUNTER x HUNTER, Kafka Asagiri and Sango Harukawa's Bungo Stray Dogs, and Gosho Aoyama's Detective Conan.
A Three-Way Battle at the Summit
Yoshihiro Togashi's HUNTER x HUNTER has captivated adventure fantasy fans in Weekly Shonen Jump since 1998. Following Gon Freecss on his quest to find his father, the series is renowned for its intricate psychological warfare and complex Nen mechanics. Despite frequent hiatuses, the series resumed serialization, pushing the intricate Succession Contest arc forward and bringing complex factional politics to the forefront.
Sharing the top tier, Bungo Stray Dogs launched in Young Ace in 2012 by Kafka Asagiri and Sango Harukawa. Following literary figures bearing supernatural abilities—such as Atsushi Nakajima and Osamu Dazai—the narrative recently concluded its monumental first part spanning over a decade, leaving readers eager to see what unfolds in the unpredictable second act.
Rounding out the trio is Detective Conan, Gosho Aoyama's defining mystery masterpiece running in Weekly Shonen Sunday since 1994. Readers voiced deep anticipation for the eventual showdown against the Black Organization, as well as the overarching romantic resolutions and cures for Shinichi and Ai.
