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.