How were American Shonen Jump covers different from the Japanese ones?

Viz Media launched the American Shonen Jump as a monthly, cover dated January 2003 and on sale November 26, 2002. Japan sells an anthology every week; America in 2002 could not, so Viz picked the chapters it judged right for American readers, led with Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh on the strength of their television fame, and built each cover as a single hero shot ringed with circular badges for the other series inside. The premiere cover is the type specimen: a Super Saiyan Goku drawn for the American launch, with One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh, YuYu Hakusho and Sand Land in circles, a 288 page premiere banner, and a barcode box where no Japanese Jump has ever needed one.

The numbers behind the design: the first issue needed three printings and sold over 300,000 copies, half the eventual circulation came from subscriptions rather than shops, and the magazine ran monthly until its final print issue, cover dated April 2012. Its successor, Weekly Shonen Jump Alpha, went digital and weekly in January 2012 and, tellingly, began using the same cover illustrations as the Japanese issues, two weeks behind Japan. Once the American magazine stopped selecting its own chapters, it stopped needing its own covers.

For a collector the two systems never merge: an American Shonen Jump cover is an original American artefact with no Japanese counterpart issue, and a Japanese cover belongs to a weekly issue America never received in that form. The spine of the American run even forms its own picture, a Naruto splash image completed across the monthly spines, a trick the weekly Japanese magazine, read and recycled within days, never attempted.