• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Comment Policy
    • Disclosures & Disclaimers
  • Resources
    • Links, Essays & Articles
    • Fandomology!
    • CLAMP Directory
    • BlogRoll
  • Features & Columns
    • 3 Things Thursday
    • Adventures in the Key of Shoujo
    • Bit & Blips (game reviews)
    • BL BOOKRACK
    • Bookshelf Briefs
    • Bringing the Drama
    • Comic Conversion
    • Fanservice Friday
    • Going Digital
    • It Came From the Sinosphere
    • License This!
    • Magazine no Mori
    • My Week in Manga
    • OFF THE SHELF
    • Not By Manga Alone
    • PICK OF THE WEEK
    • Subtitles & Sensibility
    • Weekly Shonen Jump Recaps
  • Manga Moveable Feast
    • MMF Full Archive
    • Yun Kouga
    • CLAMP
    • Shojo Beat
    • Osamu Tezuka
    • Sailor Moon
    • Fruits Basket
    • Takehiko Inoue
    • Wild Adapter
    • One Piece
    • After School Nightmare
    • Karakuri Odette
    • Paradise Kiss
    • The Color Trilogy
    • To Terra…
    • Sexy Voice & Robo
  • Browse by Author
    • Sean Gaffney
    • Anna Neatrour
    • Michelle Smith
    • Katherine Dacey
    • MJ
    • Brigid Alverson
    • Travis Anderson
    • Phillip Anthony
    • Derek Bown
    • Jaci Dahlvang
    • Angela Eastman
    • Erica Friedman
    • Sara K.
    • Megan Purdy
    • Emily Snodgrass
    • Nancy Thistlethwaite
    • Eva Volin
    • David Welsh
  • MB Blogs
    • A Case Suitable For Treatment
    • Experiments in Manga
    • MangaBlog
    • The Manga Critic
    • Manga Report
    • Soliloquy in Blue
    • Manga Curmudgeon (archive)

Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

August 28, 2013 by Erica Friedman 4 Comments

Cute, But Kind of Awful – Young Gangan Magazine

YGanganEnglish-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:

YG2

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/

Share this:

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Erica Friedman, Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazines, square enix

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Manga Therapy says

    August 28, 2013 at 11:23 am

    Soul Eater is published in Monthly Shonen Gangan, not Young Gangan. There’s no way Soul Eater could have been popular if it was published in a magazine like this. :P

    Reply
  2. Erica Friedman says

    August 28, 2013 at 12:15 pm

    Thanks for the catch. It runs in “Monthly Shounen Gangan” which was I was confused. (Ugh, J-company naming.) Thanks, I’ll, fix that.

    Reply
  3. Aaron says

    August 29, 2013 at 9:55 am

    I think the reason their are so many “useless” protagonists in Manga run in these kind of magazines is it’s a kind of “at least I’m better than that loser” kind of mentality like no matter how much of a social waste case you are in real life your still marginally better than the protagonist. Or conversely it could all be some sort of masochistic impulse but perhaps I’m over thinking that *shock* a Manga fan over analyzing his intrest I know (LOL)

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Space Dandy | ANIME says:
    February 27, 2015 at 8:03 pm

    […] East Asia at the same time as Japan on Animax Asia. A manga adaptation is currently running in Square Enix’s Young Gangan magazine since December 20, 2013. The 13 episodes of the first season aired from January to March 2014, and […]

    Reply


Before leaving a comment at Manga Bookshelf, please read our Comment Policy.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 | Log in
Copyright © 2010 Manga Bookshelf | Powered by WordPress & the Genesis Framework
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.