How Did Naruto's Final Chapters Run in Weekly Shonen Jump?

The ending was scheduled as an event months in advance. Shueisha announced the finale date in October 2014, and the closing issue was built as a commemorative object: the penultimate chapter resolving Sasuke and Naruto's fight and the war's aftermath, and chapter 700 leaping forward to the next generation, the children, the Hokage's carved face updated, in full color pages that the tankobon would later reproduce in its final volume.

Full color finales are rare in Jump's modern history because color printing in a weekly newsprint magazine is expensive and rationed to covers and lead pages. Giving the last chapter the treatment signaled the series' rank inside the magazine's own history, and it made the issue itself, rather than only the last volume, a primary artifact of the ending: the color exists first and most famously in that newsprint printing.

The issue's context completed the handover. The same era of the magazine carried the launches and rises of the series that would define the next decade, and the finale issue's table of contents is now read as a changing of the guard. Shueisha's Naruto Project coordinated the ending across media, the final film following in December, so the magazine finale was the first beat of a planned farewell season rather than an isolated event.

For collectors, the November 10, 2014 issue is the finale artifact: verify it by its double chapter contents and the color final chapter, and expect condition to vary widely, since commemorative issues were bought to be kept and also bought to be read. The Library documents it beside the 1999 debut issue as the run's two bookends.