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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Manga Magazine

The Island of Misfit Manga, Monthly Comic Birz

January 13, 2016 by Erica Friedman Leave a Comment

BirzMy stated intention for writing the Magazine no Mori column is to introduce the western audience to the vast, complex mass of manga magazines that are published in Japan. Where we have Shonen Jump only, a visit to a major Japanese anime/manga store will paralyze a western fan with the sheer number of magazines to choose from. But once you get past the number of magazines, what really impresses is the variety. And that variety is what I hope you can see when you look at my column. Action, romance for guys and girls, comics for children, for adult men and women and some interesting, creepy, creative and weird stuff around the edges. Which brings us this month to Gentosha Publishing’s Monthly Comic Birz (月刊コミックバーズ) magazine.

Birz‘s major claim to fame here in the west is as the official home of Hidekaz Himaruya’s Hetalia – Axis Powers. And it totally fits the “island of misfit manga” feel that the magazine has always cultivated. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that gothic horror Red Garden manga (illustrated magnificently by Kirihito Ayamura and written by Gonzo) has run in this magazine  – it was worth reading for the clothes alone, as was Peach-Pit’s Rozen Maiden. Just about the time I came across the manga for Penguindrum (illustrated by  Hoshino Lilly, written by Ikuhara Kunihiko as Ikunichowder) and Yurikuma Arashi (illustrated by Morishima Akiko and written by Ikuhara as Ikunigomakinako) which are running simultaneously right now, I suddenly realized that Birz series are probably better known in America as anime than as the manga that run in the magazine. Also interestingly, Comic Birz is the home to the most recent series by popular creator Kia Asamiya, Kanojo no Carrera, in which he is able to draw sexy adult women and sports cars to his heart’s content.

The website for Comic Birz has sample chapters for all the currently running stories, upcoming releases, an editor’s blog, and links to various other Gentosha magazines. The magazine costs 650 yen/issue ($5.47 at time of writing) for about 650 pages.

Comic Birz has, for at least the last decade, cultivated a sense of the weird, with one foot firmly in the Horror genre, as you can see by the cover illustrating this review. Birz comics are sometimes disturbing, often outrageous, occasionally violent and almost always unrepentant, which is what I especially like about it. They’ve also just invested themselves heavily in Yuri manga, which I know means we’ll get stuff that makes me cringe, but it’s also more likely to have murder and mayhem than blushing confessions. Phew.

Monthly Comic Birz from Gentosha Publishing: http://www.gentosha-comics.net/birz/

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Erica Friedman, Gentosha, Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazine

Tales of the Shiny, Princess Magazine

July 1, 2015 by Erica Friedman Leave a Comment

PrincessWe’ve had kings galore here on Magazine no Mori, with Young King Ours and Dengeki Daioh, and we’ve met the Queen of all Shoujo, Nakayoshi, so it seems fitting that we’ll spend some time with a princess or two. In Monthly Princess (プリンセス) magazine, everyone is royalty.

Princess magazine is wall-to-wall stories about the rich, the powerful, the magical, and the beautiful orphaned daughters of dukes with whom they fall in love. The stories may take place in far-off places and times, fantasy settings, or may be set in current school or office, but the concepts are the same. The woman (who is no longer always in need of rescuing) will be the center of attention. Ironically, the series pictured on the cover of this issue never originally ran in the pages of Princess. Hosokawa Chieko’s “Hakushaku Reijou” was a series that ran in Hitomi Comics, from 1979-1987, but which has been resurrected here to celebrate the Takarazuka version of this oh-so-classically shoujo manga series about an orphan who is actually a duke’s daughter, the powerful man who saves her life, but lies to her, and her cat, Mimi. (A performance that I was honored to be able to see in person and my goodness, was it chockful of shoujo tropes!)

The Princess website instilled in me a sense of deep cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the  page lists Princess, Princess Gold, Elegance Eve, Petit Princess and other wholly girly magazines, but just above them are listings for the Champion family of magazines, including Champion Red, which is openly women-loathing and misogynistic in ways that make my jaw ache.  The fact that these are all bunched together almost makes me suspect of Princess and it’s apparently-wholesome-but-actually-not-at-all obsession with love. Romance, it seems to say, is the opium of the female masses. The website itself is more informative than interactive. Akita Shoten, perhaps more used to selling to hardcore otaku, doesn’t seem to want to look you in the eye as it talks.

Princess monthly has been published since 1974 and reading it gives one a sensation of stepping into a more innocent past. And only a very few of the titles that have run in Princess have skipped to other media – they are few, far between and unknown here in the west. At 630 yen ($5.30 USD at time of writing) per issue, for about 600 pages, you’re getting a lot of fantasy bang for your buck.

Monthly Princess from Akita Shoten: http://www.akitashoten.co.jp/princess

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Akita Shoten, Erica Friedman, Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazine

The Magical World of Mangatime Kirara ☆ Magica

March 10, 2015 by Erica Friedman 1 Comment

mtkm16When an anime or manga franchise is exceptionally popular in Japan, it is often marked with special issues of a current magazine, or a short run of a dedicated magazine of it’s own. You can see examples of this with a long-lived franchise like Gundam. Gundam has been around for decades in one form on another – so long that it is effectively a genre unto itself. One almost expects that the anime and manga world honors Gundam with a dedicated magazine.

The Puella Magi Madoka Magica franchise was almost the complete opposite. It was designed from the outset to fully saturate the Japanese market. Anime and manga, otaku merchandising, high end accessories, make-up, clothing (for men and women), bags, movies…for a while you couldn’t walk through a shopping arcade in Japan without stumbling across something that was Madoka-themed. And so, although the series is not long-lived in any meaningful way, it isn’t all that surprising that Hobunsha, the publisher of the many Mangatime Kirara imprint magazines also has a Mangatime Kirara ☆ Magica (まんがタイムきらら☆マギカ) magazine. (Hobunsha is also the publisher of all the spin-off stories of the Magica franchise.)What did surprise me was the magazine’s longevity. It’s currently at 18 issues. If you’ve ever tried to publish a magazine, you know that that is a lot of content. For a relatively recent series, it’s an amazing amount of content.

Mangatime Kirara ☆ Magica is a hybrid magazine. Because it is focused on a specific franchise, the pages include gag comics, slice-of-life, action, comedy and tragedy stories. The characterizations are as much “fanon” as they are canon, with popular pairings and fandom-created character quirks used freely. But, this magazine is, ultimately, a corporate created tie-in meant for fans of the series, rather than truly fan-created derivative work.

The magazine does have a website, which is mostly focused on selling the manga, artbooks and other tie-in publications for the series. The website has individual spin-offs and publications reading samples, costs and purchase data and not much more. Because this is specialty magazine, there are no circulation numbers available. The magazine costs 780 yen an issue ($6.52 at time of writing) for 250 pages, plus a series-themed gift. (The above issue came with a fetching clearfile of Devil Homura, as seen on the cover. Which is why I bought it. ^_^)

This is a magazine for fans of this series, full stop. No one else would care to read 200+ plus pages of jokes about Kyouko being hungry, or Mami at home or maid Madoka. But for 18 volumes so far, enough people do that Mangatime Kirara ☆ Magica is alive and well, with stories of Magical Girls living banal lives in our world and fighting Witches in their magical world.

Mangatime Kirara ☆ Magica from Hobunsha: http://www.dokidokivisual.com/madokamagica/

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Erica Friedman, Hobunsha, Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazine, Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Why, Why, Oh Waai!?

January 15, 2015 by Erica Friedman 3 Comments

waiToday, we come not to praise a magazine, but to eulogize it.

Western manga fans know the feeling of frustration when a publisher ceases to carry a title they like. Japanese manga fans know this feeling as well. Here we are, reading a delightful series, when suddenly on the last page of the magazine there’s a notice that “This is the final issue, thanks for reading!” And…that’s it. The series has ended, the manga magazine has shuttered its doors and the artists scramble to find other methods of distribution. (Yay for the Internet, which not only makes it possible for the artist to continue the series, bur also to collect it up in digital doujinshi, so those of us who can’t get to Comiket won’t have to miss out. Phew!)

Like western fandom, Japanese fandom is trendy. A manga or anime series, a creator, even a whole genre, will go in and out of fashion. When a fandom trend becomes very popular, a publisher may create a magazine to highlight the trend. As the trend fades, so do sales, and the magazine closes. This is perfectly typical in comic and manga publishing where teens stubbornly refuse to remain young, and wander away from the comic series they loved as kids, requiring publishers to develop a whole new market every couple of years or so.

Today we’re looking at one such recently deceased title, Waai! (わぁい!) .

Waai!, which was published by Ichijinsha, was dedicated to fans of “Otoko no ko”,  which is to say, boys dressing (and sometimes passing,) as girls.   I myself never managed to pick up a copy of Wai!. In October 2013 a friend reminded me I planed on reviewing it for this column, and I completely blanked on him, as we stood in front of the Waai! display in Animate in Tokyo. 6 months later it became moot, when Ichijinsha announced that Waai! was ceasing publication.

While it was running, Waai! included manga and prose fiction.  The website was more informational, but did, on occasion, have sample chapters to read.

The Otoko no ko  character may not necessarily be understood to be a transgender character –  some are, some are not, it really depends on the series. and even in some where we, the readers, might recognize the character as being trans, such as Saito Chiho’s ongoing adaptation of the Heian classic Torikaebaya Monogatari,  the character themselves may not identify as trans.  Despite Waai!‘s suspension, the “Otoko no ko” is still an enduring manga stereotype and is carrying ongoing series like Minazuki Shinobu’s  Himegoto (for which an anime is being announced on the above cover) or the popular Usotski Lily by Komura Ayumi, but after a few years of existence, Wai! itself has passed into the forest of magazines that bear no new leaves.

Waai! Magazine, from Ichijinsha, we hardly knew ye: http://www2.ichijinsha.co.jp/waai/

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Erica Friedman, Ichijinsha, Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazine

Ready for Some Manga Action

February 12, 2014 by Erica Friedman 2 Comments

actionIt’s the beginning of a new year and we’re all feeling energetic and stuff, right? I can’t think of a better time to tackle Manga Action (漫画アクション) magazine from Futabasha.  Manga Action is another one of the manly manga magazines that fills convenience store racks on Japanese street corners.

Like other purely seinen manga magazines, the audience is presumed to be adult males. The protagonists of the story are adult men, the stories told include sexual situations. The stories tend toward slice-of-adult-male-life, with a slight fantasy element thrown in, but the variety is surprising; Manga Action stories include comedy, sex, fantasy, adventure, psychological suspense and more.

Although you might not expect to have heard of any of the manga series running in  Manga Action, the late, lamented JManga had a good relationship with Futabasha and was translating Nakua Hakao’s “Masuikai Hana” as “Anesthesologist Hana” and “Odds GP,” Ishiwata Osamu’s sports manga about the short-track bicycle racing known as Keirin.

Originally debuted in 1967, Manga Action was published weekly until 2003, when it was suspended for a time. It is currently released twice a month. At 380 yen ($3.65 at time of writing), each issue includes just over 350 pages of manga, so it’s a pretty good, cheap form of light entertainment for the salaryman on his daily commute. The Japanese Magazine Publisher’s Association puts per-issue circulation at 200,000 for  Manga Action during October 2011-September 2012.

Like most other men’s manga magazines, Manga Action frequently sports a bikini-clad model on the cover and often has other pop culture tie-ins, like gravure photo shoots and girl-group news and interviews. Futabasha has a webpage for Manga Action, but to say it is “sparse” is an understatement. The single page with magazine and series information is more like a press kit than a website. However, there is a substantial Manga Action Webcomic Page, with sample chapters of many of the currently running stories. Manga Action has a dedicated Twitter account,  in case you’re looking for updates and news.

Manga Action from Futabasha publishing: http://webaction.jp/action/

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Erica Friedman, Futabasha, Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazine

Ciao, For Now

January 13, 2014 by Erica Friedman Leave a Comment

614Y8AvqrdL._SL500_AA300_In previous posts, we’ve discussed  two of the best-known Shoujo manga magazines, Ribon and Nakayoshi. So many popular manga series have come from these two magazines, it’s almost certain that any western manga fan will have at least seen their names. But, of the three most popular girls’ manga magazines, these are #2 and #3. The best-selling girls’ manga magazine in Japan is Ciao (ちゃお).

How much more popular? According to the Japanese Magazine Publisher’s Association data for 2011-2012, where Ribon sells about 225K copies a month and Nakayoshi about 171K/month, Ciao sells 620,000 copies a month. In a market that shrinks a little bit with every passing year and better technology, this is a significant number of young girls reading actual print copies of a manga magazine.

While most of the Ciao titles familiar to a western fan are those that we might consider “for children”—Pocket Monsters (Pokemon,) Hamtaro and some of the Di Gi Charat series—at least one series that developed an older following, the Chiho Saito and Be-Papas collaboration Revolutionary Girl Utena, ran in Ciao. Based on my Twitter feed of manga artists and fans the number one series running in Ciao right now is Aikatsu!, the manga for a popular anime/collectable card game/video game franchise about girls in a idol academy.

At 540 yen per issue, ($5.23 at time of writing) for about the same number of pages, Ciao is a good buy. Ciao Land, the website for the magazine, is filled with colorful shininess and a number of tools that create audience engagement without breaking barriers between creators and readers. Reader diaries and messages from authors let each feel connected to the other. Like Ribon and Nakayoshi, Ciao‘s print edition comes bundled with toys such as accessories, writing sets, and phone and calendar stickers.

While any given issue of Ciao will be filled with typically passive shoujo manga female protagonists waiting for romance, from time to time, Ciao escapes from the shoujo manga stereotype. And when it does, as in Utena, Bloody Lily or Waza-ari Kiwami-chan, the result is not at all what you might expect. Ciao heroines have the potential do amazing things.

Ciao magazine from Shogakukan: http://www.ciao.shogakukan.co.jp/

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Erica Friedman, Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazine, Shogakukan

Dropping Our Gaze Before the Glory of Nakayoshi

October 2, 2013 by Erica Friedman Leave a Comment

Nakayoshi-Oct13In a world of stories about and for Princesses, Nakayoshi is Queen.

Nakayoshi Magazine, published by Kodansha Publishing, is the oldest continuously-published manga magazine for girls. Begun in 1954, Nakayoshi sells 170,834 copies a month, according the the Japanese Magazine Publishers’ Association. Nakayoshi has disctictively colorful covers wrapped around 500 pages of stories that range from the most light-hearted magical girl to far more serious travails of love, life and even adventure.

In the 1990s, Nakyoshi branched out into anime. Sailor Moon, a popular series running in Nakayoshi at the time, is widely considered to be the catalyst that broke shoujo out of being a small, self-contained niche, into mainstream anime and manga awareness, both in Japan and the West. Now that Sailor Moon is on the verge of a revival for it’s 20th anniversary, the pages of Nakayoshi are once again filled with teasers, and themed goods for the series.

If you’ve been reading manga for more than a few years, I’d bet dollars to donuts that you’ve heard of, if not read, a Nakayoshi series. Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, Magic Knight Rayearth and Saint Tail are all “gateway” series for folks who came to anime and manga in the 1990s. Recent popular series are Ghost Hunt by Inada Shiho,  Shugo Chara! by Peach Pit and Jigoku Shoujo and Jigoku Shoujo R (Published in English as Hell Girll) illustrated by Etou Miyuki.

Nakayoshi, like its competition in the girls’ manga market, comes packaged with “furoku;” small gifts, jewelry, accessories, stickers, etc., branded with series from the magazine, or with the Nakayoshi brand itself. The current issue, for instance, contains a paper stationary set. Nakayoshi has a website on which each series is given a page with character introductions, links to published volumes, available downloads and other typical website features. Trial chapters of current  manga is available on the website as are video trailers and promotions. Nakayoshi also has ongoing recruitment for new artists, a change from even a few years ago.

At 500 pages for 580¥ per volume, ($5.90 at time of writing,) Nakayoshi can surprise you with nearly every page. Following “DokiDoki Precure,” which as an extremely popular anime franchise in Japan, is a pretty straightforward magical girl story. “Watashi ni XXX Shinasai” is a comedy-romance, Andou Narumi returns with “Waltz no Jikan,” a love story built around that favorite of young girls everywhere…ballroom dancing. “Sabagebu~!” follows a transfer student who finds herself embroiled with the heavily armed Survival Game Club at her new school and has just been slated for 2014 anime. And even wildly popular music idols such as Vocaloids and AKB48  have a niche in Nakayoshi, as their manga runs in the pages. You really just never know what you’ll find in the pages of this Grand Old Dame of girls’ manga.

Nakayoshi Magazine from Kodansha Publishing: http://kc.kodansha.co.jp/magazine/index.php/01033

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Erica Friedman, Kodansha Comics, Manga Magazine, Nakayoshi

GFantasy, Where Girls’ Fighting Fantasies Live

March 6, 2013 by Erica Friedman 1 Comment

img_hyoushiOn Magazine no Mori we’ve discussed the issue of the demographic categories of manga several times. Today’s review is a perfect example of when those categories fail to be useful.

GFantasy, published by Square Enix, (along with what often seems like an endless number of magazines that have the word Gangan in the title) is listed by the publisher as a shounen magazine. And it is, quite likely, read by some number of young males. There is a lot of action in this magazine. But. The series best known from this magazine, has another audience entirely.

For GFantasy is the home of  Black Butler by Yana Toboso. It is true that Jun Mochizuki’s Pandora Hearts and Ryhogo Narita’s Durarara! have as much to appeal to men as women, however there is an extraordinary amount of “pretty boys in ridiculous clothes” and a fair dollop of slashable male pairs for a typical “shounen” magazine. A series like Cuticle Detective Inaba makes more sense, really, when you assume that the audience is female. Pretty boys with animal ears, shotacon, a cross-dressing boy…these are not typical tropes meant for a male audience.  GFantasy is really better understood as “shounen for women” with a fair bit of cross-over audience, as indicated by Peach Pit’s Zombie-Loan, and the Higurashi series.

As you can see from the many titles that have been translated, Yen Press has a pretty well-developed relationship with Square Enix and the Gangan imprint manga. (The anime for many of these series have been picked up  by Funimation and Sentai Filmworks.)

GFantasy began life back in 1993 as Fantastic Comic, had a few special releases and in 1994 was renamed GFantasy. There are no circulation numbers for GFantasy on the JPMA website. At 580 yen ($6.43 at time of writing) for 650 pages, it’s a good bet you’ll get your money’s worth, as long as you like fantasy adventure, perhaps spiced with a little romance.

The GFantasy website is quite good, with excited focus on the enclosed giveaway that month, news of series that have been transformed to anime and other media and a sample comic in 2 parts. More sample chapters can be found listed under “G Stories” and they have  a running prize for submissions to the magazine. (I really like manga magazines that do that. Recruitment for the next generation is an every-day job.) Unusually, the magazine has a blog on their website, as well as the usual news and fan mail form.  In my experience, this indicates a slightly higher than usual understanding of fan community by the editors and, probably, a slightly higher than usual engagement by the audience.

GFantasy Magazine, from Square Enix:  http://www.square-enix.co.jp/magazine/gfantasy/

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

Feelin’ (Big Comic) Superior

January 19, 2013 by Erica Friedman 2 Comments

51O9gUkLXcL._SL500_AA300_One of the tropiest tropes about manga culture in Japan is the old chestnut about salarymen reading manga on the train while commuting. While I have seen this only rarely in my times in Tokyo, it is still quite true that salarymen read manga. Just not so much on trains. You can find them after work hours, avoiding going home, clustered in front of the manga magazine racks in just about any convenience store. If they are reading manga (as opposed to just plain old men’s magazines) the magazines you are likely to see them reading are not the oversize phonebook-like magazines like CompAce or Ultra Jump, but thinner, staple-bound books like Biweekly Comic Magazine Big Comic Superior (ビッグコミックスペリオール).

While magazines like Big Comics Superior fill magazine racks at every corner store, you’re unlikely to have heard of many series from its pages. Ohtagaki Yasuo’s Moonlight Mile may have been made into an anime, while Team Medical Dragon by Nagai Akira and Koyasu Tamayo’s Aibo  have been made into popular TV shows, and Okuribito by Sasou Akira has been turned into a movie, these were “popular” in only Japan and not outside. If there is any one series that westerners are likely to know, it is because it is a staple of Japanese manga stores everywhere, Azumi by Koyama Yu. Oh yeah, and Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt might ring a few bells, as well. ^_^

The Superior website, has the usual volume release info, and information on series being transformed into other media, but surprisingly, a great number of the series have chapters online. This offers readers a way to try out various series before buying the magazine. It’s nice to see a Japanese publisher moving  sample chapters online.

Biweekly Superior began life as a twice-monthly special issue of Big Comic Original, but when the sales equaled Original‘s, Superior was split off as a separate magazine in 1987. JMPA’s 2011 stats put monthly circulation at 186K,  down significantly from 2010 when it was selling 246K a month. Still for 300 yen, ($3.33 at time of writing,) the magazine is chock full of science fiction, adventure, drama and sports.

If you want to know what the office workers of Japan read, take a stab at being Superior for a day.

Biweekly Comic Magazine Big Comic Superior by Shogakukan: http://big-3.jp/bigsuperior/comic/index.html

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Erica Friedman, Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazine, Shogakukan

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

October 24, 2012 by Erica Friedman 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/

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

Comp Ace, Where the Moe Things Are

September 22, 2012 by Erica Friedman 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

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

A Monthly Dose of IKKI

April 21, 2012 by Erica Friedman 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

 

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Manga Magazine, Shogakukan, SigIKKI

A Comic Beam of Light

March 22, 2012 by Erica Friedman 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.

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Comic Beam, Manga Magazine

From the Heart, Cocohana

February 16, 2012 by Erica Friedman 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

 

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Magazine no Mori, Manga Magazine, Shueisha

Wrapping it up with Ribon Magazine

January 19, 2012 by Erica Friedman 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/

Filed Under: Magazine no Mori Tagged With: Manga Magazine

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