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I recall a few years ago (around 2011) the phrase "holy trinity" being thrown
around to describe the size, magnitude and importance of _One Piece_ ,
_Bleach_ , and _Naruto_ all running in Shonen Jump. Now, with two of those
specific publications* ending, this so-called "holy" trinity is no more.

However, there would've had to have been three other manga that were
considered something like this before, right? Was there was such a confirmed
trinity of manga that ran together?

It doesn't _necessarily_ have to be from Shonen Jump, but [the closest
unsourced examples](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Big_3_Manga) from the '90s
were _Dragon Ball_ , _Slam Dunk!_ , and _Yu Yu Hakusho_ , which were likely
published in a shonen-oriented magazine.

*: This doesn't include _Boruto_. That isn't _Naruto_.


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culture manga-history
Before the era of Naruto, One Piece and Bleach being published simultaneously, was there ever another well-defined "Holy Trinity" of Manga?


The concept of Big 3 is really vague. Some say it's just a made up word for
the current popular manga in the West, which is One Piece, Naruto and Bleach
during the early 2000s. At the same time, online streaming is getting popular
around that time, mainly Youtube and Crunchyroll for anime, and also the
internet is booming at the same time (stocks of dotcoms, Google, Yahoo, etc. I
won't go into details about economics and stock market, but all of it are
happening during the early 2000s).

Now to answer your question if there are other Big 3 in the past, I would say
it's not only 3, there would be a lot. Mainly Case Closed (or Conan),
Doraemon, Astro Boy, Dragon Ball and Kochikame.

Also, who told you that the famous 90's anime are Yu Yu Hakusho, Slam Dunk and
Dragon Ball? Dragon Ball would be famous, and so is Slam Dunk, but I don't
know about Yu Yu Hakusho. There's a lot of famous 90's anime and manga to the
point that I can't name them all.

But overall, the Big 3 and what not are just opinions of other people of
what's famous or not. There's no solid measure of how famous a manga or anime
is. Unless if we are talking about sales and copies then we could make some
list. But if we are basing it all on human opinions there would be infinite
Big 3.


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It may be worth pointing out that the very notion of a 'Big three' here is
largely a male- and shonen-centric perspective. See
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manga_Best_Sellers_of_2011>
for an example, but fundamentally it's a 'Big One' -- while _Naruto_ was
clearly that popular, neither _Bleach_ nor _One Piece_ ever hit #1 in 2011 and
in fact the latter struggled to even make the top 5. _Bleach_ fared somewhat
better in 2010, but even there it didn't do substantially more than several
other titles, and the same holds true in later years as well. There's a solid
case to be made that _Sailor Moon_ should be well ahead of either _Bleach_ or
_One Piece_ in the conversation, and even titles like _Black Butler_ are
fairly comparable with the top non-Naruto shonen titles.


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