Naruto

The first version of Naruto, published as a one-shot in 1997, contained no ninjas at all. Masashi Kishimoto rebuilt the idea, sold it to Weekly Shonen Jump in 1999, and closed it 700 chapters later. The comic has sold more than 250 million volumes and turned ninjas into a genre of their own.

The 1997 story Jump refused to serialise

The 1997 one-shot made Naruto a fox spirit in human form, and Jump declined to serialise it. Kishimoto rebuilt the story around a village of ninjas and a boy carrying a sealed monster inside him. The serial started in September 1999.

That refusal shaped the result. Naruto is rejected by his own village before he is anything else, and the early chapters are about being kept out rather than about winning fights.

Kishimoto was twenty-five when the serial started, three years after winning a Jump newcomer prize for an unrelated one-shot. Studio Pierrot began the anime in 2002 and ran 220 episodes before the story reached its first ending.

Boruto puts the hero behind a desk

In 2005 the comic skips two and a half years of story and brings every character back older. Naruto Shippuden adapted that second half between 2007 and 2017, across 500 episodes.

Kishimoto finished the manga in November 2014, with his cast married and settled. Boruto started in 2017. Its main character is the son of Naruto, and Naruto himself now runs the village, so he is never at home.

Very few long-running series agree to make their hero a tired administrator. This one built its sequel on it. The Boruto anime stopped in 2023 after 293 episodes, and the comic has carried on without it.

Readers wrote the viewing guides the studio never did

Studio Pierrot kept overtaking the manga, and filled the distance with episodes Kishimoto had not written. About two Shippuden episodes in five are filler.

Readers answered with public episode lists marking what to skip, and those lists are how most viewers outside Japan have watched the series since. The streaming platforms still carry the whole run, filler included.

It is an odd position for a franchise this size: the version most people recommend is one no company ever released.

The orange jumpsuit and a sprint that left the audience behind

Before 1999, comic ninjas were mostly assassins dressed in black. Naruto put them in an orange jumpsuit, gave their village a bureaucracy and promotion exams, and made a fighting series about who gets ranked up.

The forward-leaning run its characters use has escaped the audience completely. In 2019 an online plan to storm a United States Air Force base using that run drew about two million sign-ups.

Jump published One Piece, Naruto and Bleach at the same time for a decade. Naruto is the one whose gestures escaped the page.