Thoughts on Manga Cross

 Manga Cross is the platform Akita Shoten unveiled in 2018. It was a fusion of Champion Tap and Champion Cross. The merge of the two was a natural step to take focus all its digital efforts on one platform instead of at many different ones. The platform has just passed its second anniversary and I wanted to talk about how it is doing, its achievements and failures and most importantly analyse its future and where it could go.

First of all lets list out all the notable on-going serialisation on Manga Cross at the moment -

The Dangers in My Heart - Bi Weekly
Creature Girls - A Field Journal in Another World - Monthly
Oritsue Taishi - Another World Creatures Girls Survival Journal - Spin Off - Monthly

Dai Kyochu Rettou - Bi weekly 

Maou no Musume Sugoku Choroi - Biweekly

Hitomi-chan Hitori Mishiri - Monthly

Majo Senpai Nichijou - Biweekly

Kawaii Kouhai ni Iwasaretai - Weekly/Biweekly

Umigui - Biweekly

Yuushun no Mon 2020 - Weekly

Cross Over Rev - Bi weekly

Kanmuri-san no Toukei Koubu - Monthly/Biweekly

The Love and Creed of Sae Maki - Monthly

My Boss is Goofy - Biweekly

Tsugaru Senpai no Aomori Meja Meshi - Biweekly

Ohime-sama no Ohime-sama - Monthly

Dolphin - Biweekly

Haken no Ninja Akabane - Monthly

Kamiina Botan , Yoeru Sugata wa Yuri no Hana - Monthly

Ohitsurisama - Biweekly

Saint Seiya Episode G Requiem - Irregular

I left out some series that have more irregular releases that have not received a new volume in a while.  

Some of these series like Creature Girls came from Champion Cross and they already had some success there. The rest are all new series that begun and found success in Manga Cross. 

There are also two new series that started recently

Usotsu Kitsune Ai Hanashi - No clear schedule yet

Looking at this Manga Cross has probably more series then a magazine but at the same time the schedule varies significantly which means volume releases are not as often as the main magazine. But most importantly it has a wide variation of series that would be impossible to achieve in a magazine. It has series in so many genres such as yuri, adult, gore, romcoms, sports, yankee, shoujo romance, comedy. Of course, this helps it achieve success. In particular many of these series sell reasonably well matching series of WSC and sometimes even surpassing them. In itself this is not a surprise, after all digital platforms are growing as reading manga in smartphones and similar devices become much bigger. Plus they are also interlinked with social media primed for sharing, in a way that your usual manga series with in a physical magazine is not.

One of the good things Manga Cross has done is that it is a platform with significantly more attention then its predecessors. Champion Tap was basically dead and it barely had only a couple of series update regularly whilst Cross was much better in that it had some successful series but it still had not many series. Manga Cross has way more active series than just a combination of the two and I am sure that is because it has the attention Akita Shoten much more than Tap and Cross that felt like side things that they remembered every once and while. 

It has also become a more attractive platform which has attracted more experienced authors though still mostly authors which previously had ties with Akita Shoten. There are particular authors to highlight here, the first one is Umigui's author Fujisawa Yuki, He is a veteran author with a lot of experience in champion magazines with many long serialisations under his belt.  This year he started Umigui in Cross, his first work outside a physical magazine and its first volume released not long ago. 

Likewise, this is the case for Taro Chiaki, who has many experiences with long serialisation in Monthly Champion. He started Maou no Musume Sugoku Choroi earlier this year and its first volume is releasing this month. There other cases but the significance of these two cases is that veterans were attracted to Manga Cross instead of another physical magazine. It makes the the platform more attractive to see these authors with experience, who create stable works. I dare say that these authors migrated to Manga Cross because it is  more promising then something like Monthly Champion because it has the opportunity to give more exposure than the niche that buys those magazines. Part of this is that these digital platforms are more accessible due to the lack of a paywall to read the initial chapters. 

Attracting these veterans also contrasts it from Champion Tap and Champion Cross that more often turned to unexperienced even amateurish authors, probably for reasons i have cited before it had not real attention given to them. Of course, Manga Cross also has newbies but they tend to be more polished and with the expansion of Cross and the vast amount of talented manga authors publishing on twitter and other social medias it has more attraction to bring them to the platform. 

I do realise that there is still a limitation probably of human resources for Manga Cross.  The limitation in resources could be easily solved if Manga Cross possibly received its own editorial department to only manage it. It could even come at the cost of other magazines that I feel have no future. Magazines are shrinking and I am not really brought onto the idea that they are really selling significantly digitally to compensate for the loss in print sales. Manga magazines are too big and culturally important to mostly die off like they did in China and Korea in place of digital platforms but a smaller publisher like Akita Shoten has less to lose from taking the chance, especially since Manga Cross with a just a bit more attention than Tap and Cross has grown substantially.  

This attention could result in a lot more series, since at the moment it does not have a lot of series. It does not have a new work updating every day,  at the moment it pads out its releases with magazine series re-serialising. This is more difficult to guarantee but it follows on from the previous point; the more resources, attention and management it receives from Akita Shoten, the more it can become more attractive for authors. In fact it already has become better at that as I have previously explored but they should strive for more. 

WSC 2020 Thoughts

2020 has been a peculiar year that definitely stands out from any previous year because of the circumstances we have had to live and still continue to live with at the moment. But we are not here to look at what happened in the world but at what happened to Weekly Shonen Champion. So lets stop wasting time and begin analysing.  

Winter - 

A terrific season for Champion, not only was the Mairimashita! Iruma-kun anime airing and a giving the series a sales boost, it also was when its successful spinoff Makai no Shuuyaku Wareware begun. The rises of the spinoff and its sales alongside the main series to the rank of highest selling series in the magazine crowned Iruma as the new sweet heart of the magazine. Iruma had an incredible journey, as I have highlighted in another post, so it is an even greater achievement for it have reached the status it currently has. 

As well as this there was of course, the serialisation of Koe and Meika. Both series that come from twitter and niconico respectively.  It signalled a new movement by the magazine to bring series that started outside of it in the internet. Needless to say these series found reasonable success in sales, the former especially. A important factor for this was that they already had an audience for themselves before they begun serialisation therefore they started already in a better chance than an usual series. I do think these series would be better served in Manga Cross instead of the main magazine but Manga Cross is probably not a massive source of attention for Akita Shoten yet. I do believe it needs to receive more and more attention however. 

Spring - 

The season of flowers and graduation in Japan was a quieter one for Champion. Iruma-kun's anime ended and with it came the announcement of a second season for the following year. A month after, there was the surprising news of The Vampire Dies in No Time anime adaptation which I have also made a blog post about. The series has always seemed like it was primed for an anime especially after polling high in many series we want to see animated ranking. 

In regards to new series, we had Yankee JK Kuzuhana-chan by Sogabe Toshinori standout. Toshinori is a veteran he had done the Magical Site Sept spin-off which was serialised in Champion Tap as well as works in Monthly Shounen Champion but this was his first time in Weekly Shonen Champion  and in a weekly magazine in general. Needless to say his experience shows and the series is incredibly stable and reminds me of Romcom harems of the past but with the touch of the recent yankee girl trend. 

Summer - 

A quiet season all in all. Tougen Anki by Urushibara Yura began right at the end of spring. It has managed to sell reasonably well and perhaps surprisingly was the fact that Urushibara Yura had not previously published anything or even won an award from what I have researched. It is resounding success that he or she is able to debut and find success so rapidly. Apart from that there was no really anything else in summer that was notable. 

Fall -

The current season we find ourselves in at the moment. The end of Beastars came to a surprise to some and of course it will be dearly missed because it was a rather huge success for the magazine but Itagaki Paru is coming back in due time. In fact probably in a month or two at most now for another round of Beast Complex. 

Aside from that there was the debut of a new round of new series of which two were previously published one-shot in the magazine in the past year. Usotsuki Android is a romcom with a female main character which is rather unusual for a shounen magazine but it is a cute sweet comedic story. The  Suiyou Dou Deshou collab with Champion return for a few more chapters but has already ended at this time. Last but not least was the debut of Hagure Yuusha Isekai no Bible, an isekai story, not the first since there was in 2016 Houkago Wizard Club, but it is the first since the trend really exploded.  The jury is still out for the remaining two series of this three series round but it seems promising so far. 

Concluding Thoughts - 

A good year for champion, it found new hits two of which it plucked from the net. However, on top of that Yankee JK Kuzuhana-chan and Tougen Anki also have shown sign of a success. It does seem like the new head editor might have hit a stride in these last two years after the pitiful 2017 and 2018 when it came to new hits. Lets hope there are more adaptations lined up but I am sure that is on the hands of the media department and sales department as well.