I needed an activity to procrastinate this rainy Sunday away and decided to count the number of chapters with color pages in History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi. I only counted them in volumes 1-61 and didn't include Kenichi Plus and the Gaiden volume. I didn't count the amount of times the author got to draw an illustration for the title page of Shōnen Sunday either, because I didn't feel like looking for an archive that shows all magazine covers from 2002 to 2014. Please tell me if I missed one. Color page chapters are marked blue.
Volumes 1-30
Volumes 31-61
- 62 out of 584 chapters had color pages (10.6%).
- Volumes 2, 16, 25, 30, 35, 37, 39, 42, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58, and 60 do not contain any chapter that had color pages in the magazine.
- The amount of color page chapters decreased after volume 30 and took another steep dive during the Tidat Arc.
- The longest color page draught lasted for 46 chapters, almost 5 volumes worth of material.
- The lack of color pages during the last few volumes can possibly be explained by the fact the Syun Matsuena was already preparing chapters for his next work, Tokiwa Kitareri!!, while drawing the final part of Kenichi.
- I have no explanation for what happened during the Tidat Arc. Maybe this part of the story wasn't popular enough with its readers.
- It looks like Shogakukan switched from nine to ten chapters per volume in 2006. Tokiwa and Kimi wa 008 stuck to that 10 chapters per volume formula. (First and last volumes of a series are outliers and must not be counted.)
These are your random and meaningless numbers for today. Now I'll wait for someone to tell me that I forgot a chapter or didn't count correctly.