The following photographs were taken from slides at Manga Magazine Mania, a panel staged at Anime NYC 2024 by Evan Minto. Minto himself reportedly found several of these images through online shops and auction sites.
Many of the panels at Anime NYC this year were devoted to anime premieres and upcoming licenses. But there were some exciting exceptions if you knew where to look, organized not by companies but by hard working individuals. Consider the case of Evan Minto. Like everybody else, he organized the requisite industry panel for Azuki. But then he hosted the latest installment of Anime Burger Time, a panel solely about funny clips of anime characters eating burgers. I thought his third panel was his most informative: Manga Magazine Mania, a history of comics magazine publishing in Japan. While its time slot was sadly 15 minutes shorter than Minto anticipated, there were still plenty of juicy details.
In the United States, manga is typically distributed either via collected volumes or specialized comics apps. In Japan, though, comics magazines remain viable. These magazines are published on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis. (Minto reminded us, as well, that some companies stagger their magazine releases to engineer a wide spread of manga per month.) Individual chapters from these magazines are then arranged and published as collected editions, or “tankobon.” These are then rebranded and sold for international consumption.
Elements of manga
Readers of Japanese manga magazines experience manga differently than international readers in some key respects. For instance, magazine paper for manga is of infamously poor quality. Paper is cheap, recycled and occasionally even bears traces of past works. Not for nothing is the cliche that manga is to be read on the train and then thrown straight into the garbage. Meanwhile, the margins of these magazines sometimes feature author comments and character biographies for new readers. These are cut out of the tankobon release.
Other differences are a function of magazine publication. For instance, magazines promote affiliated merchandise and solicit unproven talent. They also include advertising, which for historians immediately grounds their publication within a specific time, place. Covers vary based on demographic, featuring popular characters, caricatures or even a promise of swimsuit photos. The table of contents, too, can be a subject of debate. Fans of Weekly Shonen Jump in particular have pored over the table of contents of their chosen magazine like tea leaves to figure out how their favorite series is faring in the magazine’s cutthroat reader polls.
The invention of manga
An aspect of publication that English readers may be more familiar with are marketing demographics. Magazines in Japan are typically organized into shonen (young boys), shojo (young girls), seinen (adult men), josei (adult women) and kodomo (children) varieties. Simple on the surface, but long-time manga readers know that the reality is anything but. For instance, the shojo manga parody Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun is published in shonen web magazine Gangan Online. Editorial standards at individual magazines, rather than demographics, exert the strongest influence on manga serialization.
Of course, as Minto said, today’s manga magazines were not born but invented. He traced the origin of manga to the early 20th century. It began not with ukio-e paintings or the choju-jinbutsu-giga, but with the publication of American and European comics in Japan. (Manga industry personalities Zack Davisson and Erica Friedman told a similar story at their own manga history panel at Anime NYC. They recommended Eike Exner’s book Comics and the Origin of Manga: A Revisionist History for further reading.) Japanese artists were inspired by newspaper comic supplements from these countries to create their own. One such example, Jiji Manga, began publication in 1902. But these supplements carried political cartoons and comic strips rather than the “story manga” that Japan later became famous for.
Boy’s comics
Demographics gradually began to take shape. As in Korea, government censorship initially restricted content and incentivized the publication of children’s magazines. An early example was Kodansha’s monthly Shonen Club in 1914. It included articles, photos and (eventually) manga that was longer than what you’d find in newspaper strips. It was also printed in color, a significant difference from manga today.
Over the next few decades, publishers like Akita Shoten and Shueisha put out their own monthly boy’s magazines. But it wasn’t until Kodansha’s Manga Shonen, published by former Shonen Club editor Kenichi Kato, that manga was made the focus. Manga Shonen’s most popular series included Kazuo Inoue’s Bat Kid (which you can read in English today) as well as Osamu Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion. Manga Shonen also solicited reader submissions, another step towards modern manga as we know it.
Fierce competition
Magazine serialization faced competition from rental manga. Osaka offered akachan books, “red books” published with cheap paper. Osamu Tezuka’s New Treasure Island was among the most successful and launched his career as a popular artist. Others varied in style and content, as Ryan Holmberg wrote at Comics Journal. The Osaka market planted seeds of what would become the gekiga movement, “alternative comics” for an adult audience.
Meanwhile, Kodansha launched Weekly Shonen Magazine on March 17th, 1959. On the same day, the publisher Shogakukan launched Weekly Shonen Sunday. The stories in these magazines borrowed from serialized radio dramas, just as Tezuka’s work took influence from film. Weeklies swiftly displaced monthly publications. Even Nakayoshi, Kodansha’s magazine for girls, switched its schedule from monthly to weekly. Shueisha responded with its own girl’s magazine Weekly Margaret. Competition was fierce.
Comics for the people
Into this crowded arena came Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump. While Jump would go on to become the most successful manga magazine ever, it initially could not attract the prestigious artists employed by other publications. As a result, the magazine’s editors accepted amateur submissions and offered to represent their inexperienced artists as agents. They also utilized reader surveys to determine what their audience was most interested in. These practices determined the magazine’s later strengths (popular young artists contractually bound to Shonen Jump’s pages) and weaknesses (formulaic story structure, a willingness to kill off fledgling series rather than give them a chance to grow and evolve.)
During the protests of the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese students embraced manga as their chosen medium. Pulp comics for children became counterculture. Tomorrow’s Joe, for instance, embodied the hopes and frustrations of its readers at that time. So did Legend of Kamui, a politically radical ninja comic by Sanpei Shirato. Kamui was published in Garo, once the great alternative manga magazine. Meanwhile, Go Nagai’s 1968 series Shameless School proved that manga didn’t have to be respectable or even avant-garde—it could also just be filthy.
The birth of seinen manga
Eventually the booming Japanese economy ensured that readers could buy the magazines and tankobon they wanted rather than relying on rental manga. That took the bottom out of the rental manga market. Its artists jumped to new magazines for adult readers: seinen magazines, starting with Futabasha’s Manga Action in 1967. Some series you may be familiar with include Monkey Punch’s Lupin III as well as Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub.
Manga continued to diversify in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. Children could start with Doraemon in the pages of CoroCoro Comic before moving on to Shonen Sunday. Then they could jump to Tezuka or Koike’s adult work, or even to other magazines that focused on pachinko or mahjong.
JUNE things
At the same time, there was space in the market for experimental magazines. One such example was June, a magazine focused on boy’s love comics founded by Toshihiko Sagawa and edited by manga artist Keiko Takemiya and novelist Kaoru Kurimoto (under the pen name Azusa Nakajima.) The magazine was so influential within its particular readership that works in the same aesthetic vein are still sometimes called JUNE-mono or “JUNE things.”
Another important step was the creation of josei comics. Originally known as redicomi or “lady comics,” early magazines in the field featured erotic comics targeted at adult women. These works fulfilled the needs of readers who wanted explicit material that shojo comic magazines refused to provide. They also offered space to female artists that were tired of working within the editorial restrictions of those earlier magazines for young girls.
Four heavenly kings
The four most popular magazines in Japan, though, were all for young boys: Shonen Magazine, Shonen Sunday, Shonen Jump and Shonen Champion. Series published in these magazines were designed from the ground-up to be read in later collected tankobon. Competition for sales and top artists were fierce. One way to even the odds was TV anime adaptations. While manga once considered anime a source of competition, it later became its most powerful promotional tool.
Kodansha in particular became famous for a strategy known as “media mix.” Rather than adapting a manga series into an anime or vice-versa, the publisher would build out anime and manga versions of a particular concept at the same time. Sailor Moon was a great example. While the manga series was published in the pages of Nakayoshi in 1991 before the release of the anime in 1992, both manga and anime were planned at the same time. The release schedule was synergized so that Sailor Moon would be omnipresent through the 90s no matter what your demographic.
A slime appears!
Manga sales declined in the late 1990s. Magazines closed across all demographics, and Shonen Magazine snatched Jump’s #1 spot in 1997. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that several popular Jump comics, such as Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk, wrapped up around this time period. It should also be said, though, that manga faced competition from a new medium–video games. Enix Corporation, the publisher of roleplaying megahit Dragon Quest, launched the imprint Gangan Comics in 1991. Its magazines included many popular series (such as the beloved Fullmetal Alchemist) as well as coverage of affiliated video games.
Despite the popularity of manga abroad, it is undeniable that the market has shifted. Tankobon sales surpassed manga sales back in 2005. Digital manga revenue surpassed that of print magazine in 2016, and tankobon in 2017. Many of Shonen Jump’s most popular series run in its online Jump+ branch rather than in the print magazine. Vertical scrolling webtoons, particularly those from Korea, have been very successful as well. That’s not to say that paper is obsolete. Artists know that physical media presents opportunities for print and texture which digital cannot replicate. Then again, manga as a medium has never valued paper quality.
Wherefore art thou magazines?
Minto ended the panel by suggesting means to obtain Japanese manga magazines for those curious. Digital magazines are available via the Japanese website BookWalker. The Japanese bookstore chain Kinokuniya, which has a handful of locations across the United States, also offers manga magazines in the magazine section.
The American publishing industry experimented in the past with English print editions of Shonen Jump, as well as composite anthologies including Shojo Beat and Raijin Comics. These unfortunately no longer exist. In fall 2024, though, Star Fruit Books is set to launch the indie manga magazine Comic Bright. If it proves to be successful, it’s possible that we might see comparable efforts from other manga publishers in the United States. For that to happen, though, readers must prove that the format is viable.
Manga itself
Minto brought several copies of physical manga magazines with him. These included older issues of the seinen magazine Big Comic, the josei magazine Feel Young and the experimental Garo among others. Seeing these magazines for myself, I was taken back by how swiftly digital comics reading has displaced the physical packaging and branding of past decades. You might think that the prices of old issues would spike as a result. Yet as Minto says, manga back issues remain surprisingly affordable. The magazines were only ever a delivery method. Manga itself was what mattered.