Manga Magazines

Cute, But Kind of Awful – Young Gangan Magazine

August 28, 2013 by Erica Friedman 4 Comments

English-language readers are more familiar with the pages of Young Gangan than they might expect, due to Yen Press’s relationship with Square Enix. Bamboo Blade, Sekirei, Working!! and Saki are other titles that have been brought over as manga or anime. Nonetheless, it’s hard to be an adult paging through this magazine without thinking one is missing something crucial to actually enjoying it.

On the other hand, Young Gangan is also home to award-winning, slightly wacky and unique Arakawa Under The Bridge, by Nakamura Hikaru. This is one of the most popular series in the magazine and the anime was licensed for North America by NIS, but the manga remains almost wholly unknown here.

The magazine website for Young Gangan, which is part of Square Enix’s family of magazines, has little original content. Ads for upcoming volumes, magazine specials, upcoming events and issue content fills the page.

Young Gangan runs just around 470 pages for 320 yen ($3.26 at time of writing), with twice monthly distribution. When you visit Japan, Young Gangan and magazines just like it fill convenience store racks, looking to hook young (nebbishy?) men with manga about other young (nebbishy) men and pictures of partially clothed girls. In fact, the above picture for the current volume at time of writing is not representative at all. The cover is far more likely to show a girl in a bikini, like this:

With not-quite softcore photos of “gravure” idols filling the pages and manga that is rarely standout good or bad, for better or for worse, I tend to categorize this as a magazine for the kind of guys who call girls “fake geeks.” The magazine is very boy’s club, but not very kind to its readers. Male leads in the manga in biweekly Young Gangan are often slight loser-y nebbishes, confused by their lives and the madness that surrounds them. I have long felt that if I were a nebbishy guy, I’d rather read a story in which the nebbish triumphs over whatever, gets the girl and lives happily ever after. But that never seems to occur to the creators of these manga.

Young Gangan from Square Enix: http://www.square-enix.co.jp/magazine/yg/

A Bouquet of Manga, Flowers Magazine

June 19, 2013 by Erica Friedman 2 Comments

Flowers, a Josei manga magazine from Shogakukan, is a veritable showcase of talent. Regardless of which series are running in the magazine at any given time, the list of authors is practically a checklist of manga history. Names that were publishing top-notch manga in the pages of Flowers magazine more than a decade ago are still publishing top-notch manga in the same magazine now.

In the current volume of Flowers, the award-winning, essential manga Heart of Thomas creator, Moto Hagio, contributes a brand new Sci-fi series Away. Saito Chiho, best known here for the manga version of Revolutionary Girl Utena, is working on a manga retelling of the classic Japanese tale of gender-switching, Torikaebaya. Tamura Yumi’s 7 Seeds was begun on the pages of Betsucomi in 2001, but continues in the pages of Flowers, since 2002. Also notable for western fans, Higa Aloha’s Shirokuma Cafe, which was given an anime adaption and streamed as Polar Bear Cafe, runs in this magazine.

Ancient Japan, the modern world and futurescapes live side by side in Flowers. Stories of alternate histories, such as Akaishi Michiyo’s Amakusa 1637 – which completely rewrote Japanese history – and Moto Hagio’s science fiction Barbara Ikai, will sit comfortably next to Yuu Watase’s Fushigi Yugi Genbu Kaiden. Japan’s past, present and future, talking animals, alternate states of being…this Josei magazine, while showcasing grace and beauty, is not at all afraid to ask, “What if it all goes wrong?” The predominant art style is one I’d like to call “Timeless” without irony. These artists have been working for decades and, in some cases, have been genre-defining. One can see the influences of decades of manga and centuries of visual references from Fine Art in the pages of Flowers.

Flowers magazine comes in at just over 500 pages for 570 yen ($6.04 at time of writing). The magazine has a website, which contains interviews with, messages from and profiles of the creators, chapters of new stories for preview, and publishing schedules. (If you want to be sobered by the sheer mass of work by some of the women who publish in Flowers, click on a few bios and looks at the lists of books in print. Akaishi-sensei has something like 50+ books *in print* right now.) Flowers has a 2011 – 2012 monthly circulation of 33,000.

Looking at the cover above, it would be easy to dismiss Flowers as a repository of girlish fantasy but, if one did so, one would miss the crucible of talent that makes the Flowers stable some of the longest-running, most-popular and most-talented group of creators in manga today.

Flowers Monthly Magazine, from Shogakukan: http://flowers.shogakukan.co.jp/

Humming a Love Song with LaLa Dx

April 2, 2013 by Erica Friedman 2 Comments

So, we’ve talked many times about the vague lines that differentiate shounen/seinen and shoujo/josei. In real life, there is no one age when all boys shift from caring about becoming ninjas to liking looking at girls in bikinis and there is no one moment when girls stop wanting to be a princess and suddenly start paying attention to the cute boy in class.

When we read manga that has been licensed from Japan, we’re often seeing the very best of the bunch—the Fruits Baskets and the One Pieces—and yet, when you see pictures of manga stores in Japan, there are acres of shelves filled with…what?

Today we’ll talk about LaLa Dx, one of those fields filled with flowers of shoujo romance that you are never likely to see here in the US.

LaLa is a relatively well-known monthly magazine, home to several properties that have made to our shores, such as Yuki Midorikawa’s Natsume’s Book of Friends and Hiro Fujiwara’s Kaicho wa Maid-sama, because of the relationship Viz has with LaLa publisher Hakusensha. LaLa Dx was originally a supplement to LaLa and is now its own bimonthly shoujo manga magazine. Like most of the Bestu, Za and Dx issues of monthly manga magazines, LaLa Dx is smaller than it’s better-known sister—international size A5 rather than the typical B5 size for the monthly magazines. According to the Japanese Magazine Publisher’s Association, Dx comes in at about 67,050 per issue circulation in 2011 (as compared with LaLa‘s 155,950). Small, but packed, Dx comes in at a hefty 850 pages with surprisingly little advertising—none of these series are making it to anime. So for the 690 yen ($7.32 at time of writing) you’re getting a lot of love.

LaLa Dx has a website, but perched in that vague space between childhood and maturity, it’s not quite interesting enough to be appealing to children, and doesn’t quite have content for an older audience. Part of the LaLa family of websites, the site is mostly and advertisement for the current issue. Interviews and other features are integrated with the other magazines on the site. Giveaways are, as well. These days, you’re likely to find a LOT of nyanko-sensei items as LaLa gifts and contest prizes.

When one opens the pages of Dx, one is looking at story after story of young women and young men not getting together for any number of reasons—you know, typical romance stuff. The plot might be driven by horror or comedy, but the story is romance. Friendships will be torn, secrets will be revealed, kind faces will become stern and angry faces will prove to be protective. This magazine is a field of smiles, of tears, of love. This is what you see, when you look at all those shelves in manga stores. And this is the space between pop idols and cute boy in class…with a little princess thrown in for good measure. ^_^

LaLa Dx by Hakusensha: http://www.hakusensha.co.jp/lala/mag_laladx/now.html

The Most Familiar Manga Magazine You’ve Never Read, Hana to Yume

December 12, 2012 by Erica Friedman 7 Comments

Here on Magazine no Mori, I seek to introduce you to the rich and varied world of manga magazines available in Japan. From kids’ books to the kind of thing you might actually see that mythical salaryman read on that mythical commuter train, I’ve barely scratched the surface. If I’m fortunate enough to continue this column for ten more years, I will still have barely scratched the surfaced, there are just that many manga magazines…and new ones popping up all the time.

Today I wanted to step off the unbeaten path I usually take through this forest of magazines, to look at what is arguably the best known manga magazine that no one in the west has ever read. ^_^

Hana to Yume (花とゆめ) magazine published by Hakusensha is the source material of a huge chunk of Viz’s shoujo imprint (and before that, much of Tokyopop’s shoujo in later days.) Just a random sampling of titles from this magazine will be instantly familiar to most western manga readers: Tachibana Higuchi’s Gakuen Alice, Suzuki Julietta’s Kami-sama Hajimemashite (published in English as Kamisama Kiss), Oresama Teacher by Izumi Tsubaki, Nakamura Yoshiki’s Skip Beat. Hana to Yume was also the magazine in which the record-breaking Fruits Basket by Takaya Natsuki, ran. Two of the seminal (yes, pun intended) BL classics that comprised the vanguard of the Boy’s Love genre back in the day, Yuki Kaori’s Angel Sanctuary and Matsushita Youko’s Yami no Matsuei (Descendants of Darkness) also come from the pages of Hana to Yume. For as comprehensive coverage as possible on Hakusensha titles available in translation, check out Sean Gaffney’s blog, A Case Suitable for Treatment here on Manga Bookshelf.

In fact, so many titles are familiar to the English-language manga audience, it’s worth taking a look at the Wikipedia article for the magazine just to take stock of all the titles that *haven’t* made it over here, among which is one of my favorite series of all time – Shinji Wada’s Sukeban Deka, Which brings me to an interesting point about fashion in manga magazines. In the 70’s and 80’s, Hana to Yume was a “weird” magazine, full of speculative fiction series, action, and really off-beat stories. I picked up a recent issue to find that the current art style is significantly simplified and the stories, while they may have supernatural elements, are mostly romantic comedies.

Hana to Yume has a website, Hana to Yume. com, with the traditional girly, pink, sparkly, flower-y look, previews of this and next month’s magazines, a game corner, and a branded “mangaka course.” The magazine also has a stripped-down Hana to Yume Online site, suitable for reading on mobile devices. The lack of decoration makes the exact same content suddenly appear more mature. ^_^

Hana to Yume premiered in 1974 and now has supplemental titles, Bessatsu Hana to Yume and The Hana to Yume. These come in a smaller size than the monthly magazine, which sells for 350 yen ($4.24 at time of writing.), with about 500 pages per issue – and one of the strongest creator line-ups in manga. The most recent data from the Japanese Magazine Publisher’s Association put the magazine’s monthly circulation at 189,113 for 2010-2011. Thanks to English-language translation Hana to Yume series are probably better loved here, (as unknown as the magazine itself is,) than in Japan where its standing among girls’ comics magazines has been slipping – from 4th in 2006, to 7th in 2010.

If you’re a western fan of shoujo manga, Hana to Yume has probably been your gateway drug. ^_^

Hana to Yume, by Hakusensha: http://www.hanayume.com/hanayume/index.html