Why did Shōnen Jump turn Attack on Titan down?

After the 2006 one-shot prize, Isayama first offered his work to the Weekly Shōnen Jump department at Shueisha. The documented answer was advice, not a door slammed: he was told to modify his style and story to be more suitable for Weekly Shōnen Jump. Isayama declined, and took the project to Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine department instead.

Kodansha’s side of the story has a second act the pitch meetings could not have foreseen: rather than shelving the series in an existing magazine, Kodansha launched it in the debut issue of a new monthly, Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine, in September 2009. The rough edges Jump wanted sanded down became the series’ signature, and the magazine built around it outlasted the run: Bessatsu is still publishing. It remains the cleanest case study in modern manga of an author keeping his art, changing publishers, and being proved right by 140 million copies.