Weekly Big Comic Spirits – 2001 Issue #4-5 – Author Comments

The year 2001 was a pivotal year for Shogakukan’s Weekly Big Comic Spirits (週刊ビッグコミックスピリッツ) magazine. For the magazine that started in 1980, it was celebrating its 15^th year anniversary from it’s change to a weekly release starting in 1986. The cover designs would change over to almost exclusively gravure photos, rather than a focus on the manga titles and the fruit/vegetable mascots which was the standard for the years past. Additionally, the year 2001 would include a changing of the Editor-in-Chief. To catalog these changes on a more issue-to-issue basis, we are starting a new article series looking back at each issue of Weekly Big Comic Spirits via the author comments found on the table of contents. A new article will be released each week, on the same release date as it was exactly 25 years ago. Please enjoy this journey on exploring another manga magazine for the entirety of 2026. You can find all of our articles related to Weekly Big Comic Spirits on this page.

The cover date on the issues are not the actual release dates for the magazine. As such, we will be posting the articles based on the calendar date when the magazine was actually available for readers to pick up in Japan. In the year 2001, this would typically be published on every Monday.

Every issue, the editorial staff would ask a single question to all of the published authors. While the magazine was released weekly, not every series in the magazine was published in each issue. Below is the listing of the manga series as they appear in the issue along with a rough English translation for the question and each response.

Issue Info

Release Date: 12/25/2000
Cover Date: 1/13/2001
Cover Design: Mascot (Pineapple)

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• Millennium Stock Exchange Legend: Monkey Money was a new serialization.
• Contained 2 chapters of the 20th Century Boys manga.
• Kijou no Kowloon‘s final chapter in Weekly Big Comic Spirits. It ran for a total of 11 chapters. It would later be continued in three different magazines under the title Shin Kijou no Kowloon (真 机上の九龍).

Question

It’s the final issue of the 20^th century!! What is the one thing you want leave behind moving into the 21^st century?

いよいよ20世紀最終号!!
のここれだけは21世紀に遺したくないというものは?