Would The Weekly Magazine Format Work Outside Of Asia?

Exactly what the title says.

I've actually met a lot of people who read manga online, then don't bother buying the official release because they've already read it. I've also seen several scanlation groups that stop scanlating a series immediately and honorably when the official release of a series catches up to them.

Leading me directly to this. For those people, as well as casual readers, do you think the weekly manga magazine format can work outside of Asia?

I could see it working if each release in the magazine comes out within less than a week of the Japanese release, even simultaneously (which might be possible if the publisher doing the magazine has a really good relationship with the publisher in Japan), along with starting the series running in it from chapter 1 in the same issue, in order to allow people who don't read manga illegally to actually know what's going on.

Shonen Jump seems to be the most popular one in North America, but it's so far behind that I'm willing to bet that a significant chunk of the subscribers are just in it for the broken Yu Gi Oh promos and recycle the magazine.

What are your opinions on this?

If local publishing partner's agreement? Yes. Plus the mag will be of the right price.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic here, but I just don't think there's enough of a customer base to support a weekly manga magazine. The issue of translating within the week isn't nearly as much of an problem as the fact that they can't make a profit doing it.

Firstly because the number of manga fans here is already a small portion of the population—significant, but not large. Secondly because the people who would get a subscription out of that group is an even smaller portion of the total. So you end up with a very small readership—meaning none of the advertising space you sell will be worth much.

This is all based on the U.S., though, since I don't know much about the situation in other countries.

From what I've heard, Europe has a much larger percentage of the population liking anime/manga than North America.

I agree that it would be difficult to make it work in the US, though.

EDIT: Also, translating within a week isn't an issue. China does it, as do scanlation groups.

edited 22nd Aug '11 7:02:26 PM by burnpsy

But publishing companies in Japan are assholes and insist that it takes MORE than a week.

In short, unless people who runs the industry stop being crap and greedy, this won't be resolved.

Well, as I said, China gets the magazines in Chinese in less than a week.

But yeah. Someone would have to convince them that it would equal $$$.

Only one publisher in North America ever attempted to publish a weekly magazine of translated comics. That was Gutsoon, which published Raijin Comics weekly from December 2002 to October 2003. It became a monthly, and only lasted another few months. (See the Raijin Comics Wikipedia entry for more info.) Only the monthly Viz edition of Shonen Jump is still in print, perhaps because it carries a lot of series with name recognition.

Here's a list of manga magazines published outside Japan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manga_magazines#Published_outside_of_Japan You will notice a good number of them have been cancelled, regardless of where they were made. I'm sure there's many factors, including companies' financial problems and expensive distribution.

Here in the US and Canada, there is a lot of pessimism about any type of media in print. The chain of bookstores known as Borders (aka Chapters and Waldenbooks) are all closing, and the future of its competitor Barnes and Noble is cloudy at best. E-readers, computers, and the like are definitely taking quite a bit of the market that was once dominated by paper. This affects every category of print media, including the somewhat small niche of translated comics.

So yeah, I don't expect many publishers to create print magazines with manga and similar comics. The future for anthologies may be online, assuming that publishers can sell their content for computers and e-readers.

You have a point there. I've been staring to think that, too...

I suppose e-readers have to be the way to distribute now, I guess.

edited 23rd Aug '11 7:17:57 PM by burnpsy