Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Erica Friedman

Learning to Read Manga the Cutest Way Possible with Ne~Ne

by 1 Comment

In all the discussion of genre in manga, and how there’s “something for everyone” in Japan but that many of those audiences are entirely under-served in the west,” the one segment of the audience that is least served by western manga publishers is…children.

Yes, there are are titles that could appeal to children on the western maket. Gon, Yotsuba, Pokemon Adventures, Chi’s Sweet Home – these have all-ages appeal. (For more kid-friendly manga titles, try the Graphic Novel Reporter’s Core Ten Manga for Kids and check out their full 100 for some interesting suggestions.) But, in a country where Shounen Jump is the only translated manga magazine that’s made any impact on the market for any extended period of time,  you can be sure there’s a lot of kid’s comics being printed in Japan that we’re not seeing.

 

Around our house, a favorite children’s magazine is Ne~Ne. Ne~Ne is an elementary school level reader, illustrated by characters that many Americans would know:  Rilakkuma, Mameshiba, Nyanpire and many other character goods characters, interacting – within their own worlds – in 4-panel comics. These comics are not, as one might suspect, full of morality plays or real-life skills as American children’s media always is, although there are word matching, maze-scaling, picture drawing games in these magazines. No, there’s no such “appropriate for children” educational stuff going on here. For example:

There’s a lot going on here: The cat with the eyepatch is Dokuganryuu Masamunyaa, the cat avatar of the famous one-eyed general, Date Masamune (who was known as Doukuganryuu – the one-eyed dragon). The cat with the cross is the blood-sucking cat Nyanpire and the partially transparent cat is Nyatarou-chan, a ninja cat, that Masamunyaa marks with the word “ninja” so they can see him more easily. The 4-panel strip is titled “Signpost” (which is my new word for the day.)

This is life in a typical (?) children’s magazine; where animals decorate cakes, children swim in the ocean and are covered in squid’s ink, warring period general cats study history, cheerful pieces of toast put cheese on themselves and characters eat, drink and make merry in a hundred marketable ways. Ne~Ne is a mere 86 pages, for 680 yen ($8.89 at time of writing) which makes it one of the more expensive of the magazines we buy, but the entertainment value is pretty high. We love Ne~Ne around here, because it also comes with loads of giveaway goods, stickers, cards and other ephemera.

Ne~Ne is not, as with most other manga magazines, sold to its readers. Children under the age of 8 rarely have a lot of disposable income, nor do they always have computer access of their own. The website for Ne~Ne is not full of bright colors and shiny things. Instead it clearly is meant to appeal to the family-oriented sensibilities of the parents who buy the magazine for their children.

As a primer for living in a consumer-goods society, Ne~Ne is pretty ingenious. It’s also a fun way to learn to read for overseas otaku who obsessively buy things like Masamune Date goods. (Stop looking at me like that!)

Ne~Ne, by Shufu to Seikatsusha (Which has the English tagline: A publisher, igniting your life with fulfilled sources of information): http://www.shufu.co.jp/magazine/nene/

Comp Ace, Where the Moe Things Are

by 4 Comments

When people casually refer to Japanese manga magazines as “phone books” they are commenting on the general size, thickness and paper quality of the things. And of these phone book-sized magazines, there are few as impressively phone book-like as Monthly Comp Ace. One of the many Kadokawa Shoten magazines designed to generate highly popular anime franchises and massive amounts of related goods, Comp Ace magazine reaches an impressive 900+ pages all for a mere 780 yen ($9.97 at time of writing).

Manga series from the likes of Comp Ace rarely become licensed properties, and when they do, they more often perplex than delight. This is due to the specific qualities of the 4-panel comics that run in the magazine, comics which are designed to cater to the hardcore anime, manga and gaming otaku of Japan. Lucky Star is probably the most globally well known-of these series. Lucky Star actually made it over to western shores as an anime – that did not do nearly as well in the west as it did in Japan, where it *still* inspires fans to make pilgrimages to the town where it is set – and as 8 volumes of manga which suffered at the hands of poor translation at the beginning and bad management throughout it’s time on shelves.

Manga that runs in Comp Ace is far more likely to do well in game form, as the audience for this magazine are gamers at their core. Idolmaster: Xenoglossia, many of the Fate/ series, Cardfight! Vanguard, Tantei Opera Milky Holmes and many other games have graced Comp Ace‘s pages as manga.

Lastly, and to some extent most successfully here in the west, many of the franchises whose spin-off manga runs in Comp Ace, are well-known to westerners as anime series. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vivid, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Gurren Gakuen-hen, Macross Frontier, Kiddy Girl-and Pure, Canaan, all have had some anime presence here in the west.

Comp Ace is part of the Comptiq set of magazines for the same audience, many of which include the same series or cross-overs of series. The website for the magazines is: http://www.comptiq.com/ Each individual magazine is given a cover page with a list of contents, and there is a general news link for the site and specific series are highlighted on the menu.  Interestingly, these magazines often come with goods as extras. I picked up this copy of Comp Ace for the fan with an intimate picture of Fate and Nanoha from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, (a series of which I am a fan, despite myself. ^_^;)

The problems with the translation of these manga to English are severalfold. The in-jokes are crafted for Japanese fandom, many of the rituals and habits of whom are alien to western fans, and the 4-panel comic format is about as funny in Japanese as Sunday paper comic strips like Blondie are in English. Many of the series in Comp Ace tend towards the eroticization of pre-pubescent girls, in extreme displays of moe art. Female nudity is copious and unrealistic. In fact, despite the fact that I follow a few of the series in Comp Ace, reading it always leaves me with the feeling of needing a shower.

Comp Ace, from Kadokawa Shoten: http://www.comptiq.com/indexca.html

Young King Ours, A Slightly Eccentric Manga Magazine

by 5 Comments

Young King Ours has the tagline (in English) “The Most Eccentric Manga Magazine,” however, as the art is not crazy nor are the stories particularly wacky, the claim is a bit of an overreach. I’d give Manga Erotics F or Comic Beam the wins for eccentricity, but Young King Ours would probably be one of the leaders of the following pack.

Young King Ours is published by Shonen Gahosha Publishing, one of the lesser known publishing companies, and yet many of the titles that ran in the Pages of YKO are well known to western readers. Rikudo Koshi’s Excel Saga called YKO home until it finished its 15-year run at the end of 2011. Kouta Hirano’s Hellsing is another well-known title, as is Yasuhiro Nightow’s Trigun Maximum.

YKO began life in 1993 as a supplement, but became a monthly magazine in it’s own right in 1997. It sells for 550 yen/issue ($7.00 at time of writing) for just around 550 pages. Japanese Magazine Publishers’ data puts YKO monthly circulation at a modest 53, 000 in 2010, down significantly from 2008’s 68,000.  The website is the very opposite of eccentric, as there is little on display other than the titles running that month and a message or two, lumped together as it is with the other Shonen Gahosha publications. No contests or giveaways here.

The stories that run in this magazine are not immune from the power of fanservice, but surprisingly, the characters drive the story far more than sexualized images. The magazine is more likely to appeal to a slightly less…dare I say it…creepy?…audience that does indeed like large breasts but doesn’t seem to need the constant reassurance that the female characters wear underwear that fills the pages of other seinen magazines. Maybe for that reason, it is an eccentric manga magazine after all.

Young King Ours by Gahosha Publishing: http://www.shonengahosha.jp/ours/index.php

 

 

A Monthly Dose of IKKI

by 4 Comments

 The irony this month is thick. I have been reading IKKI magazine for approximately three years and in that time I have not managed to review it. Now that my reason for reading it is gone, I finally am taking the time to review it…just before I stop getting it regularly.

In fact, part of the reason I have not been able to review it was because I was reading it monthly for a series that is unlikely to make it over here in English, but is nonetheless the best manga I have ever read. It left me emotionally spent with every issue, so I couldn’t just sit down and write about it, or the magazine.

IKKI is relatively well-known to American readers, as Viz Media has an imprint of titles specifically coming from IKKI, known as SigIKKI. These titles include Childen of the Sea (Daisuke Igarashi), Afterschool Charisma (Kumiko Suekane), Kingyo Used Books (Seimu Tsuchida), House of Five Leaves (Nastume Ono), Saturn Apartments (Hisae Iwaoka), Dorohedoro (Q Hayashida) and Bokurano Ours (Mohiro Kitoh). These have been covered by many English-language manga reviewers, so I hope you don’t mind if I skip covering them. Another title that ran in IKKI that might be familiar to the English-reading audience is Iou Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo.

Less well known to western audiences are other currently running series; of note Est Em’s “Golodrina,” about a woman who is being trained to become a matador; “Sex Nyanka Kyouminai” by the team of Kizuragi Akira and Satou Nanki, Banchi Kondo’s manga about baseball “Bob to Yuukaina Nakamatachi 2010,” and the reason I read IKKI at all, “GUNJO,” by Nakamura Ching, among many, many other series.

The general feel of IKKI is not terribly light-hearted. It’s a dark magazine, with dark roots and bits of dark stories popping up all over the place. It’s so dark at times, in fact, that as one reads a relatively innocent story, like “Ai-chan” or “Stratos”, one keeps waiting for the boot to drop and something awful to happen. Post apocalyptic life and murder sit comfortably next to unstable clones and gritty tales of survival in extreme circumstances.

IKKI has a website in Japanese, with sample chapters, featured messages from the manga artists and a list of shops where current volumes are available. SigIKKI also has a website in English where there are previews and downloads available for series that are carried under the imprint. At 550 yen ($6.60 at time of writing) for about 430 pages, IKKI costs just a few cents per page of entertainment.

IKKI is undoubtedy a magazine for adult readers of comics. It’s not that there’s sex, but that the themes are more about life – survival, even – in a variety of circumstances. A fan of Dostoevsky would be comfortable with the level of instrospection and conflict in this magazine. IKKI falls solidly into my “fifth column” of manga, if only for the lack of feel-good, team-oriented heroes fighting the good fight. IKKI is the dark side of seinen, away from the guns and running along rooftops, and closer to the quite desperation of making the best of a bad situation.

IKKI from Shogakukan: http://www.ikki-para.com/index.html

 

A Comic Beam of Light

by Leave a Comment

“Monthly Comic Beam A Magazine for the Comic Freaks!” reads the tagline of Enterbrain’s Comic Beam magazine.(コミックビーム)

At a mere 25,000 copies sold every month, Comic Beam is not a contender in sales in any category of manga magazine, but that’s not a concern for the creators and editors of Beam – instead, they are playing to the small, but hardcore comics-reading audience,people who don’t care what category a manga is but just want to read good stories. Nominally listed as “seinen” (for young men,) along with Kodansha’s Morning 2, Shogakukan’s IKKI and Hakusensha’s Rakuen Le Paradis, Ohta’s Manga Erotics F, Comic Beam can easily be considered part of a small, but slowly growing genre of manga not limitedby gender or age, but is targeted to “whoever reads it.” I have taken to referring to these magazines in my head as the “fifth column” (i.e., not shoujo, shounen, josei or seinen.)

Comic Beam is the home of a number of stories that have been published in English. Kaoru Mori’s story about love between different classes in Victorian England, Emma, wasthe first to make its way here, through CMX’s beloved but unfortunately unsuccessful edition. Astral Project (Marginal and Syuji Takeya), Bambi and Her Pink Gun (Atsushi Kaneko), King of Thorn (Yuji Iwahara), and Fancy Gigolo Peru (Junko Mizuno) have allbeen released in English. Eagerly received, and from Fantagraphics is Takako Shimura’s award-nominated tale of tweens dealing with gender transitioning, Wandering Son. Currently running (and adorning the cover of the image above) is Mari Yamazaki’s award-winning Thermae Romae, a story that whimsicallycombines modern Japan and ancient Rome through their shared cultures of bathing. (This series is about to be launched as a  a live-action drama and anime in Japan.) I was both surprised and pleased to find Izumi Takemoto contributing a charming little Heidi-esque romp, Akane Kono Mahou, to the current lineup.  Kaneko Atsusuhi’s dark speculative fiction manga Soil has generated some press on both sides of the ocean as well.

Enterbrain has a website, mostly to provide information for potential contributors.There are no chapter previews and currently no downloads. It’s a sparse, somewhat depressing site. Given the “experimental” nature of the work in Comic Beam, it would probably be a good choice to offer example chapters, but then, the audience already knows what it likes.

Taken as a whole, it’s easy to label Comic Beam an “art house” comic magazine. There’s room for the sweet, the grim, the wacky, the serious, real and fantastic, all with room to explore artistic stylings and story telling techniques. Comic Beam is indeed a comic for comic freaks. People who prefer their stories formulaic and predictable need not bother. The light from Comic Beam will appeal to few, but for those few, it will be a beacon illuminating the world of manga magazines.

Comic Beam from Enterbrain and Kadokawa Group Publishing: http://www.enterbrain.co..jp/ad/html/media14.html

*Originally published on Mangacast.

From the Heart, Cocohana

by 4 Comments

It’s not often I’m in the right place at the right time to see the birth of a new magazine. This time, I was. Shueisha’s Cocohana launched in time for January 2012 and I just happened to be at a store that carried it when it hit the shelves.

Cocohana is being positioned as a Shoujo magazine for adults. As a result, the feeling is neither quite Josei, nor Shoujo, but some hybrid creation. From my perspective, it works.

To bump up its appeal to an adult audience, Volume 1 started right off with a few power names on the roster, Higashimura Akiko (known for Kuragehime, known here as Jellyfish Princess,) with “Kakukaku Shikajika,” Yamashita Tomoko (Dining Bar Akira,) with a one-shot, “Biseinen,” and is reprinting some previously serialized stories from Chorus magazine, including Haruno Nanae’s classic Papa Told Me. (This gives me hope that, perhaps we’ll see her Pieta re-serialized. This story is one of my favorite older Yuri series and as the Yuri audience now exists as a thing on its own, I think Pieta‘s time has come.) “Ashi Girl,” by Morimoto Kozuek,o is the kind of fantastic mix of historical rewrite and female experience that I haven’t seen since Akaishi Michiyo’s Amakusa 1637. I’m looking forward to more of it.

Previews of most of the series running in Cocohana are avialable on the website: http://cocohana.shueisha.co.jp/viewer/index.html, as are messages from the manga artists. Uniquely, the Cocohana main page also includes a Twitter stream of messages by the manga
artists, something I haven’t seen any other magazine website include – despite the adoption of Twitter by many manga artists. The website also offers a personalized fortune-telling session, if you send your information in by form.

Scheduled for 28 volumes a year, Cocohana retails for 500 yen ($6.44 at time of writing,) for approximately 450 pages, which puts it at the high end of per-page cost for a manga magazine…another sign that this is for an older audience. Bolstering the idea that the magazine is Shoujo, not Josei, it comes with a giveaway – a small purse – but, with art by Anno Moyocco which confirms that the audience is adults. So far, in image and story, Cocohana is balanced perfectly to present a specific image.

Cocohana, the shoujo magazine for adults, from Shueisha: http://cocohana.shueisha.co.jp

 

Wrapping it up with Ribon Magazine

by 2 Comments

If Nakayoshi is the Queen of Shoujo magazines, Ribon is the Grand Duchess. Begun in 1955, Shueisha’s Ribon magazine is one of the unquestionable leaders in shoujo manga, with Kodansha’s Nakayoshi and Shogakukan’s Ciao magazines. Each issue of Ribon is approximately 550 pages. At 480 yen ($6.24 at time of writing), you’re getting more than a page per yen, plus fabulous presents -called furoku – with each magazine. Furoku are commonly stationery and pens or pencils, hair or phone acessories or bags of many shapes and kinds. (We have piles of Ribon furoku in my house. Sometime we get the magazine just for the goo-gaws.)

Ribon was home to the first “magical girl” series, Mahoutsukai Sally and the arguably first Yuri manga series, Shiroi Heya no Futari.

If you’ve been involved in the manga scene for any length of time, Ribon series will be very familiar names. Some notable series from Ribon are Marmalade Boy, Hime-chan no Ribon (now resurrected with a news series, Hime-chan no Ribon Colorful), and those series made so popular in the early days of Tokyopop and Viz Shoujo; Kodomo no Omocha (published in English as Kodocha: Sana’s Stage,) Ultra Maniac, Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne and many of Arina Tanemura’s most popular series, like Full Moon o Sagashite. Currently running in the pages of Ribon is Tanemura’s “Sakura Hime Kaden,” published in English by Viz as Sakura Hime: The Legend of Princess Sakura. I was reading Ribon myself for Eban Fumi’s Yuri series Blue Friend, which was popular enough to get a second “season” and has recently wrapped up.

Of course Ribon has a website: http://ribon.shueisha.co.jp/ The site includes pages for this month’s issue, next month’s issue – a separate page for the furoku included with this month’s issue (I’m not kidding when I say the furoku is a major player here) – manga currently available in collected volumes, Manga how-to tips, information for the in-house manga competition to find new artists, and extras of many kinds, including cover page wallpapers, games, previews of new manga, profiles of readers, aka “Ribon Girls” and more. All of it surrounded by heart-filled, polka-dotted backgrounds and spinning, moving scrolling ads. It’s fantastic, really. You should take a look.

When most westerners think of “shoujo” style art, they tend to think of the Ribon house style; oval faces with slightly pointed chins, eyes not as large as Nakayoshi‘s house style, held up by long necks. Where Nakayoshi tends toward stories that glitter and shine, Ribon stories are more grounded, with real-life situations and pressures playing a major part of the drama. Think Kodomo no Omocha‘s Sana, mixing stories of being one of the beautiful people with real-life family crises.

Ribon is, to my mind, the paragon of current shoujo sensibility. While monthly readership has dropped in 2010 , 243,334 readers a month is something that few American magazines can boast.

The Grand Duchess of shoujo manga, Ribon magazine: http://ribon.shueisha.co.jp/

Magazine no Mori in the Evening

by 7 Comments

It’s a well-known, unwritten rule of otakudom that one should never write or talk about something that other people know anything about. If one should venture into known territory, there’s a high likelihood that someone will be moved to explain to you how wrong you are.

Many people are familiar with Kodansha’s Morning magazine, and its slightly odd twin brother Morning Two. Likewise, people are relatively familiar with their older sister, Afternoon. But, because it’s out all day at work, and doesn’t get home until late, very few people know about their big brother magazine, Evening.

Evening magazine has a 2010 circulation of 147,980/month. It sells for 330 yen for just slightly over 400 pages an issue. Evening is one of those magazines you see most walking into convenience stores anywhere in Japan.

A few of the Evening series are going to be well-known to western readers. Most well-known are Moyashimon, that comedic series by Masayuki Ishikawa about cute bacteria, which is still ongoing in the magazine, and BLOOD ALONE, Masayuki Takano’s manga that shifted from Dengeki Daioh to Evening. Evening was involved in another another notable shift, when Gunm, Last Order (translated here as Battle Angel Alita, Last Order) was famously picked up and huffed from Ultra Jump to Evening finish its run when the creator, Yukito Kishiro, had issues with management.

Of note to people like myself who like oddball series, is “Yondemasuyo, Azazel-san,” by Yasuhisa Kubo about “funny”  demons in hell (which has recently gotten anime treatment) and “Shoujo Fight!,” a series about women’s volleyball that will never make it over here because, while sports manga in the west sells indifferently, sports manga about girls never even make it here at all. Forget then, ever seeing “O-Gari,” Tachiko Aoki’s action gaming story around women playing Shogi. (Fans of Saki, and Shion no Ou take note of this one.)

On Evening‘s website, one finds the typical features one expects with a manga magazine website – series overviews, interviews with creators, sample comics, features of new series, downloads and, somewhat less usually, a job board and special non-profit collbgoration with Father’s Quarterly (FQ) magazine related to a series “Prochichi,” a story about a stay-at-home father by Mieko Osaka.

Instantly a reader of Evening will realize that they are presumed to be an adult. The focus is on story, character and art, instead of gimmick or service. Where something like “Captain Alice” would, in Ultra Jump be full of T&A, in Evening, it focuses on great reactions shots and a surprisingly detailed  plane interiors. It’s easy to imagine salarymen picking up a copy of Evening on their commute home, and so they do.

Evening magazine from Kodansha: http://kc.kodansha.co.jp/magazine/index.php/02134

 

 

Lifting Our Heads for a Little Kiss

by 4 Comments

Kiss magazine, published by Kodansha, has star power. If for no other reason than that one of the most popular and successful Josei franchises of recent years, Ninomiya Tomoko’s Nodame Cantabile, called Kiss home until the series and supplementary chapters came to an end in 2010.

Kiss magazine began publication in 1992 as Monthly Kiss, it is now released on the 10th and 25th of every month. It weighs in at approximately 350 pages an issue, for 450 yen (5.53 USD at time of writing) and pulls in a very respectable 127,962 monthly circulation, according the the JMPA’s 2010 numbers.

Kiss magazine has a website on Kodansha’s Comic Plus system, which offers current volumes for sale, a community on which to share thoughts about one’s favorite series, and a way to send messages to the creators, sample chapters, special sites with interviews, contests for new artists and more.

Series from Kiss are not high on the list for either translation into English as manga or transition to anime. Nodame Cantabile was a notable exception, as it spawned anime, manga, live-action dramas and even documentaries. Currently the series Kuragehime, by Higashimura Akiko, has created some noise as a popular anime.

There is little experimental art in Kiss. The style runs to clean, realistic rendering, even in explicitly fantastic stories like QB Karin – Keishichou Tokushu SP-ban.

Overwhelmingly, the feeling of stories that run in Kiss are stories for adult women. “Kiss and Never Cry,” “Gin no Spoon,” “SatoShio,” “Maison de Nagaya-san,” all are focused on relationships – life, family, career and romance. In fact, if there’s one strong theme running through Kiss, it’s the drive towards life-work balance…a topic that will be of interest to just about any working woman.

Kiss is a gentle magazine. There’s going to be no surprises here, no violence, no sex; fan service comes in the form of adult male characters who treat their women well. Kiss magazine is a familiar touch, a gentle peck on the cheek from a dear friend.

Kiss Magazine, from Kodansha: http://kc.kodansha.co.jp/magazine/index.php/02292

This article was originally published on Mangacast.net.

(Sincere apologies for my extended absence here…work has been “interesting.” ^_^;;)

The Edge of Darkness, Comic @Bunch

by Leave a Comment

If you’ve read anything I’ve written about manga magazines, you know I love the obscure and unique. Not AX unique, “look at me, I’m so experimental! Penises!” unique. I like unique when it comes by it honestly. Authentic oddballity, if you will.  Fortuitous circumstance lead me, therefore, to Monthly Comic @Bunch.

Monthly Comic @Bunch is a relative newcomer to the comic scene. Replacing Weekly Comic Bunch, along with Monthly Comic Zenon, Monthly Comic @Bunch began publication in January 2011. There are no circulation numbers available yet, and Weekly Comic Bunch last posted data in 2008, with a monthly circulation of 182,672. At 650 yen ( $8.50 at time of writing) for about 670 pages, you’re getting a page per yen of action, adventure and a fair measure of screaming, for one reason or another.

Compared with other Seinen magazines, Monthly Comic @Bunch  feels very much as if the editorial staff’s main requirement is that the artists draw something they want to draw, as opposed to something that will sell. As a result, there’s no one cohesive thread in Bunch’s choices.  Explosion- and violence-filled “BTOOOM!” by Inoue Junya sits side by side with Mizu Asato’s children-and-animals story “Meina no Fukurou.”

What will probably strike a Western audience first is that few, if any, of the creators or stories’ names are known here. With the exception of some of the “Hokuto no Ken” (Fist of the North Star) stories, and Usamaru Furuya’s manga adaptation of Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human, both of which ran in Weekly Comic Bunch,  Monthly Comic @Bunch is filled with talented artists and skilled storytelling that we’ll probably never see here in English.

Monthly Comic @Bunch does have a website, Web@Bunch, with samples of manga, both running currently, and website-only. The site includes messages from the creators, a blog, links to published collected volumes and the usual sort of functions on magazine websites.

The standout Monthly Comic @Bunch series for me are Nakajima Michitsune’s fantasy war story, “Gunka no Baltzar” set in a Napoleonic War-style setting, about a young man moving up through the ranks; police action/adventure story “Ouroboros” by Kanzaki Hiroya, and the story that dragged me here in the first place, “Avare Senki” by Nakamura Ching. Let me talk a little bit about this story, because in a world where Bakuman is being talked about so often, there needs to be an “Avare Senki.”

Bakuman is a fictionalized story about two young men trying to make it in the manga world, written and drawn by two men who have made it in the manga world. “Avare Senki” (which translates to something like “Stingy Wars” or maybe the “Battle of Cheeseparing,” or “Miserly Combat,”) is a story about the bone-crushing poverty and exhaustion endured by a manga artist and her assistants when she’s working steadily, but has not “made” it. Wrapped in a plot of working on a fantasy series called Avare Senki, Nakamura-sensei draws a sobering, but not entirely depressing, tale of deadlines, ramen, smoking and recycling materials. For people who want to really see behind the curtain of a manga artist’s life, forget Bakuman, and turn to “Avare Senki.” It will open your eyes, I assure you.

When compared with many Seinen magazines, there’s a refreshing lack of creepy fanservice here. The magazine feels quite manly overall, and there is a sense of edginess to it that pervades most of the pages, even if it eschews the most banal tropes of fanservice. This isn’t to say there is none – but when compared with many of the top Shounen magazines, this magazine is significantly more mature.

For fans of the obscure, the authentically edgy, Monthly Comic @Bunch, is a don’t-miss magazine.

Monthly Comic @Bunch from Shinchosha Publishing: http://www.comicbunch.com/

An Introduction to Feel Young Magazine

by 9 Comments

If you’re an average American reader of manga, you have probably never heard of Shodensha Publishing’s Feel Young Magazine. For one thing, it’s Josei, the genre of manga least represented on American manga shelves. Nonetheless, many of the artists featured in the pages of Feel Young have made it over our to shores and so, while the magzine itself lives a life of near-complete anonymity here, it’s practically glows with talent.

Yumi Unita (Bunny Drop,) Moyoco Anno (Happy Mania), Tomoko Yamashita (Dining Bar Akira,) Mitsukazu Mihara (The Embalmer,) Kiriko Nananan (Blue,) Mari Okazaki (Suppli,) Erica Sakurazawa (Between the Sheets,) have all at one time or another penned stories for the adult, female audience that makes up the readership of Feel Young. For this reason, as I perused the piles of magazines that live in my house, I chose to take a look at Feel Young as my first josei magazine.

Feel Young was first launched in 1989, as a sister magazine to the now-suspended FEEL magazine. Its intended audience is adult women and, based on the comments it receives and publishes, it is indeed reaching women 18-45 years of age. Based on the a JMPA’s magazine sales data, Feel Young has a circulation of 45,542 (and one overseas reader….)

While stories in Feel Young often star women in their early 20s, juggling careers and romantic relationships, as in Suppli, stories of women in their 30s and 40s attempting to maintain work-life balance are not uncommon. Recently more stories about one-parent or alternative families, such as Bunny Drop and Ohana Holoholo have been serialized in its pages. When the popular series from the 1980s, Hana no Asuka-gumi was re-started after an 18-year hiatus, it was run in Feel Young to try to attract those women who had been fans of the original series when they were in middle and high school. New Hana no Asuka-gumi ran for an additional 8 volumes, so I think we can say that approach worked. The magazine also occasionally runs stories with Boy’s Love motifs, for an overall feeling of “a little of everything that might appeal to women.”

Other than Bunny Drop, currently running in Feel Young is Mari Okazaki’s new series, &, which combines the popular “young woman making her way in the world” with a stong strain of suspense. If  Suppli is re-licensed and sells well, I would be surprised not to see & licensed. Personally, I’d love to see Yamashita Tomoko’s work, HER be licensed – her current series in the magazine is another set of short character profiles that dig surprisingly deeply into people’s live in a short story format.

I currently read the magazine for Shimano Shino’s Ohana Holoholo, a story about an alternative family made up of a single mother, her former female lover, her child, and the child’s late father’s former male lover. (It sounds more dire than it is. It’s quite cute.) Finally, Shinobu Nishimura’s RUSH is something that I am constantly sure must *certainly* be licensed already, but never is. I know of two companies that were, at some point in time, interested in Yamaji Ebine’s Love My Life – which had a live-action movie based on it come out just a few years ago – but neither company managed to get the book over here.

It would be easy to dismiss Feel Young as something filled with soap operas and daytime dramas, but…it’s not. Feel Young is a consistantly excellent women’s manga magazine, with less of an oppressive “style” than many magazines have. The stories vary in temperment, in tone, in art style and often in levels of reality. Stories of meals at home with the family live right next to dramatic stories of pretty boy detectives tracking down Goth-Loli fantasy figures, gang girls roam the streets of Tokyo right next to a well-meaning hospital staff Office Lady trying to figure out what it means when the Doctor who kissed her also tries to kill her. And these live cheerfully next to stories of raising children and having careers. Of the josei magazines I’ve read, Feel Young stands out as a platform for some of Japan’s best josei talent.

This article was originally published at Mangacast.net.

Magazine no Mori

by 2 Comments

Welcome to the newly named Magazine no Mori, where I will try to guide you through the dark tangled forest of Japanese Manga magazines and, hopefully, we’ll discover some wondrous manga truffles along the way. (Was that pushing the metaphor a little too far? I think it might have been.)

As much as I consume a ridiculous amount of manga and of manga magazines, my tastes run to the fringes of all typical categories of manga. Of shounen, shoujo, seinen and josei, the manga I read the least is the most popular – the shounen.

So it was some suprise to me that Shounen Sunday really is all that and a bag of chips.^_^

Of course I had heard of Shounen Sunday. I just hadn’t ever given it any thought. When I finally cracked the covers, I was instantly greeted by series that I, and you, will be familiar with.

First published in 1959, Shounen Sunday has a 2010 monthly circulation of 678,917. At a cover price of 260 yen per volume ($3.31 at the time of writing) for more than 450 pages, you’re getting a page and a half of manga per cent spent.

And, oh, what you are spending those cents on! The names that write for Shounen Sunday are, well, legendary. Prominent among them are Adachi Mitsuru (Asaoka Kouko Yakyuubu Nisshi), Takahashi Rumiko (Rinne), Watase Yuu (Arata Kangatari ~Engaku Kougatari~). These run alongside series that are probably better known over here by title than by their creators’ names, such as Takashi Shiina’s Zettai Karen Children, Hata Kenjiro’s Hayate no Gotoku (known in the west as Hayate the Combat Butler), Wakaki Tamiki’s Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai (known as The World Only God Knows) and Aoyama Gosho’s Detective Conan (known here as Case Closed).

Weekly Shounen Sunday has a website in Japanese with news, interviews and “backstage” with the manga artists, links to collected volumes, and other typical magazine “stuff.” In addition, Viz has an English-language site for “Shonen Sunday” where you can find downloads, creator profiles and series synopses.

Despite the somewhat irksome persistence of misogynistic “service” (breast groping, nipples visible under clothes and crotch shots), this magazine is undoubtedly targeted to boys who plan on becoming immature man-boys in the future. I’d love to love Sunday, but it’s hard to see past the “Boys Only, Girlz Stay Away” sign on the treehouse door.

This is particularly frustrating, as Sunday’s pages are replete with very cool baseball, soccer and other non-dating sim-esque manga inside. If the service was notched back a few degrees, I might add this to my monthly rotation. As it is, I think I’ll pass.

As a box of chocolates, while there are a whole lot of caramel and peanut treats inside, there’s just a few too many yucky jellies for my taste. But your taste may vary. ^_^

Weekly Shounen Sunday, by Shogakukan

Taking a Close Look at Ultra Jump

by 11 Comments

This article was originally published at Mangacast.net.

As sure as boys become men, some boys who read manga become men who read manga. And, at some point, battles for ninja clan supremacy fail to fully meet the emotional needs of that audience. No, that audience wants more violence, less focus on teamwork and strangely uncomfortable series that resolve without ending or end without resolving. For these readers, Ultra Jump is the magazine of choice.

Running 16 series currently, Ultra Jump is heavy on the sci-fi/fantasy and action, with some martial arts and a soupçon of magic. Ultra Jump got it’s start in 1999, some 30 years after it’s younger brother Shounen Jump. UJ is a monthly magazine, retailing in Japan for ￥560 ($6.65USD at time of writing) for just over 500 pages and like Shounen Jump, it’s available pretty much anywhere manga magazines are sold in Japan and in most Japanese bookstores in America. The 2010 circulation for Ultra Jump is reported to be 73,20 which is slightly up from 2009’s 70,834 and close to the 2008 circulation.  Ultra Jump has a digital magazine called Ultra Jump Egg, which provides sample chapters of manga series that have just begun to run in the magazine or, are perhaps being considered for it.

Of the series running currently in Ultra Jump, several have had a checkered experience on US shores. Infamously, Tenjou Tenge, which recently finished, was originally licensed by CMX, who had the nerve to deprive the readership of a glimpse of girl’s underwear and was therefore censured strongly by the folks least likely to actually buy the thing anyway. Viz has rescued this audience from that hell of not being able to see girl’s underwear, and new omnibus volumes are starting to hit the shelves.  Hayate x Blade (the actual reason that I get Ultra Jump) has been licensed and published through volume 6 by Seven Seas. Because Sevens Seas licensed the title from the original publisher, Mediaworks (who ran it in Dengeki Daioh magazine through Volume 8, when it moved to Shuiesha and Ultra Jump,) there is some confusion among fans whether Seven Seas will be able to continue it at least through that point or whether Volume 6 will be as far as the series makes it in English.

Because Ultra Jump is a Shueisha book, it’s no surprise that Viz has a strong presence in the UJ license game. Hyperviolent dystopian Gumn, known here as Battle Angel Alita, has undergone only slightly fewer iterations on these shores as it has in Japan and has managed to successfully reach Volume 14 of the Final Order series. Volume 15 is slated to be released in autumn 2011 Bastard!!, which made it to Volume 19 in English, is known for going on hiatus with some regularity (and has reached that stage of “venerable old series, which means it is serialized on the order of twice a year, perhaps.) Bastard!! is now on hiatus in English, as well. Also currently published by Viz is the hyperviolent dystopian Dogs, Bullets and Carnage.

Ultra Jump series have a tendency to be very long-running as manga series, (Ninku, Tenjou Tenge, Gunm, Steel Ball Run) but if they are turned into an anime at all, the anime tend to be OVAs or short series without second seasons. The overwhelming feeling as a reader is that this is a magazine for readers of manga, as opposed to anime/manga fans. And not just readers, but readers who are in for the long haul, who are content to see the plot develop through long fight arcs and the small spaces in between them. Of the remaining unlicensed titles, I can see Jumbor being ported here, fueled by any success with Takei Hiroyuki’s collaboration with Stan Lee, Ultimo – Jumbor has very similar character designs, but a slightly more classic sci-fi feel. And I wonder if America would be ready for a Wild West manga like Minagawa Ryouji’s Peace Maker. Viz is still slowly popping out Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, so there’s at least a chance that, when that finishes, Steel Ball Run, a hyperviolent dystopian tale of the meanest polo game you ever did see, might make it over here. That, or when they hit the lottery and want to throw some of that money away on something people want, but will never buy.

The hyperviolent dystopian magical series Anima Chal Lives (one of my personal faves in the magazine), Grandeek Reel, Heaven’s Prison and Hatsukoi Magical Blitz all have about the same chance of being licensed as Needless, which is to say little, for any number of reasons, from constant, uneditable nudity, to constant, uneditable semi-nudity. (The Needless anime was licensed, I’m still not sure why. never was there a better-named series.)

I’ve seen UJ alternately labeled shounen (for boys, say 12-15) and seinen (for young men, say 16-25.) I’d weigh in on the side of seinen. It’s not that young boys can’t or won’t read and stick with long series – One Piece proves the lie on that pretty quickly – but that the sensibility of the stories, and the crises of identities are more “adult,” if you will. When I began this article, I was surprised, pleasantly, at how many of the series for this magazine have made it over here.  Viz has already resurrected Tenjou Tenge and, damn I’d love to hear that Hayate x Blade will be continued.

Ultra Jump, published monthly by Shueisha. http://ultra.shueisha.co.jp/

Erica Friedman write reviews of Yuri Manga, Anime and related media at her blog Okazu .