What I Want from Weekly Shonen Champion

I noticed that over the years of keeping this blog I had never written I piece on what sort of stuff I want from Weekly Shonen Champion. I realise that a magazine will never really appease me fully but over the years I have grown to hope for changes in Champion especially as my magazine losses appeal to me rapidly over the last few years. So I will indulge myself a bit in this piece. 

The spin of Mairimashita! Iruma is also a great sellers for Akita Shoten but its sales are not necessarily moved by its presence in the magazine. The Iruma namesake is just one factor for its popularity, the other and bigger factor is the presence of the Wareware Shuuyaku group. This group of youtubers have a large dedicated fanbase which has even made their own isekai manga reasonably successful.One of the first things that I want to see is a removal of spin off series.  For instance Worst Gaiden Guriko is a spin off Worst a series that originally was serialised in Monthly Shonen Champion. It has filled a space of yankee series in Champion that has been left unfulfilled since Gmen ended and it sales are reasonable. These sales, however, are not moved by the series itself but by its association with Worst and this is shown by how others spin off from Worst in other magazines are able to sell just as well. 

Weekly Shonen Champion - Akita Shoten

Hence, these series could easily be placed elsewhere else and they would still sell well. So, they are simply occupying space that I feel would be better filled by an original series. An important reason for this is because Weekly Shonen Champion is one of the biggest magazine for Akita Shoten and wasting a potential space that could be filled with an original hit is not a good thing in the long run. 

Aside from the spin off works, the magazine has mellowed out a lot over the last few years. By this I mean the magazine has become lighter with more upbeat series especially with the recent addition from webseries such 'A Girl Who Cant Speak...' and 'Meika-san...' which are more simple upbeat series. This became a problem for me because the magazine was never fully dominated by a sort of series, it had yankee, sports, gags and some other genres but that dominance of upbeat series made me miss something with a bit more atmosphere like BEASTARS in its early days. The popularity of BEASTARS did not make them move one inch towards more series like it, in fact they have probably moved to more upbeat works probably due to the influence of Iruma-kun. 

Weekly Shonen Champion - Akita Shoten

I want to see this reversed even if all evidence goes against it, I would like to see unusual series like BEASTARS that do not necessarily have their genre singularly defined. Series like this that stand out from the usual in shonen magazines are in themselves a good thing in minor magazine like champion because their size should give space for experimental series that audiences could not find elsewhere A series like AI no Idenshi or BEASTARS would never be serialised in a shonen magazine but Champion made it work and both were popular works, the latter a lot more. However, one of the problems of this is that there is probably a limited amount of talented authors that can match those two. So, it might not always work as series form the get go and this leads to my next point nicely. 

AI no Idenshi - Yamada Kyuri, Akita Shoten

Short series are a great way to gauge interest of readers in a series and at the same time develop authors. Many hit series from champion originated as short series such as Mitsudomoe, Shinryaku! Ika Musume, Furutto on Thursday and BEASTARS. Part of this originates from how almost all series that are cancelled usually fail to grasp people attention in the first few chapters and it is hard to recover from that. Short series gives the chance to see if a series will work or not by being a test run of the first few chapters the most important for any manga to grab readers. This is exactly what the last head editor Sawa did but I would like to take it up a notch which would mean there would be less new series starting but many more short series with popular ones being made into official serialisation. Short series would became a key part of the magazine way to find new hit. It would be more effective than simply starting a new serialisation, since readers input would have more weight and in the end they are the ones that the magazine is trying to satisfy. 

BEAST COMPLEX- Itagaki Paru, Akita Shoten

In addition, short series of three chapters allow more time for newbies to explore their ideas. short series are a great way for newbies e to test themselves, since they can not necessarily rely on just a simple one off story but instead have to build and pace a wider story, in very few chapters. For instance, Hamayan one-shot Madoromi was a very simple and self contained story that was good, whilst his short series required a lot more of him, since he had to shape a story that was well short but that felt naturally paced and he paced his test with flying colours.We just need more of that and this year Champion has had more short series than it had in its last few years combined. 

To be continued - First I want to talk about Sunday though.

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