From an ATT: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/query.php?parent_id=123716&type=att

Manga magazines — despite technically being "magazines" — shouldn't be classified under the Magazine namespace. These magazines contain nothing but unrelated manga, and these manga are often brought over divorced from the magazines themselves, so any trope-worthy similarities we could glean from multiple works being packaged in a single magazine are totally lost on English-speaking audiences.

Many of the current pages are stubs with a few lines of setup, long lists of works they carry (often jamming a half-dozen sister magazines into the same page), and no tropes — despite being classified as Works pages, which require a minimum of three tropes.

• Shōnen Magazine
• Shonen Champion
• Nakayoshi
• LaLa

Manga Time Kirara — which does meet the minimum trope requirement — is also a mess, with six different magazines jammed together on the same page. Furthermore, Houbunsha has other magazines with substantially similar content (Love Lab) that can't be put on the page since they're not from the Kirara sub-brand, and it also has a web app, Comic Fuz, with a handful of original titles and a handful of transplants from Kirara, leading to potentially duplicate tropes if I were to create a separate page.

I don't see the value in keeping these under the Magazine namespace, except for maybe Shonen Jump, which seems like the only one popular enough to actually sustain it. And even then, the page is an absolute mess, with folders listing like two dozen separate imprints.

I really think most — if not all — of these should be consolidated by publisher and moved to publisher Creator pages, similar to how western works are classified. We already have one for Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko, but I don't see why we need this short stub of a page when we could have a single Kadokawa page that includes titles from Comic Cune and Monthly Comic Alive, which are also Kadokawa.

Edited by WarriorsGate on Jun 4th 2023 at 2:31:25 AM

I think we need to separate magazines that have own original content (Like Literature, but with multiple topics?) and magazine publishers, and move the latter to Creator/, which is where publishing and distributing companies are often at.

Edited by Amonimus on Jun 4th 2023 at 12:42:39 PM

The most popular magazines seem to be gaming magazines, so it's understandable there'd be a lot of overlap with the Video Game namespace. We also have tropes like Eight Point Eight and Critical Backlash, which are inherently relevant to gaming magazines since they review games.

It didn't attract much discussion, but previously, I proposed treating Magazine pages as hybrid work/creator articles that only need to meet the requirements for one of those two page types.

That seems like a band-aid instead of a proper solution. We'd still be left with a bunch of half-done pages for magazines that 99% of the people who use this site can't read and can't trope. Better to consolidate everything onto publisher Creator pages, and then only spin off individual pages for magazines that can sustain them.

Edited by WarriorsGate on Jun 4th 2023 at 3:09:18 AM

That's pretty similar to the British Anthology Comic model - something like 2000 AD, Crisis, Warrior or Eagle may eventually start crossing over certain series, but it's not generally a single shared universe model.

I think there's value in keeping a page for the magazine, but that doesn't stop us indexing by publisher (Creator page) as well. We've sometimes taken that approach for Western comics when a publisher has multiple anthology titles.

That's a good precedent for putting manga magazines into the Manga/ namespace. All other comics magazines are in the Comicbook/ namespace, since they are comic books, what with that being the actual definition of a comic book (a term which This Very Wiki consistently misuses, but that's a discussion for another thread). So for now I would say the pages for Japanese comic books should be moved over to Manga/ and treated as index pages for the various mangas published within them.

If their only purpose is comic release perhaps they would be a better fit for the WIP Platform/ namespace? [1]

Most of the manga magazine pages already have a half-dozen different imprints on them. Do we split those off into separate indices? Because some of them only have three works (with pages on the wiki) or less. And if we do keep them on the same page, then it's basically a Creator page anyway.

Many of these publishing conglomerates also have their hands in light novels too and use their manga magazines to pump out manga adaptations. So they go beyond the manga namespace.

I was thinking Platform/ as well, now that it's being created.

(Interest statement: I launched Magazine.Manga Time Kirara in 2013 or 2014, and is still heavily involved in it and the associated work pages; the OP is likely be familiar with my edits.)

I do agree that Anthologies Comic has some duality in it, in that they're both magazines and creators as defined here. Depending on the individual magazine, many of them are heavily editorialized, so this makes them in the shoe of creators. In fact, Scorpion 451, in a previous TF I raised, states in that particular query, an Anthology Comic (or its editors jointly) is in the position of a creator to apply Reused Character Design.

And since we are also getting into the realm of light novels, I'd like to note that the only LN imprint I am aware of that has a page here is in the Creator namespace (Creator.Dengeki Bunko), which I have some issue with—can a Creator-namespace entity be the creator of another Creator-namespace entity? We don't have a page of the entire Kadokawa conglomerate (only their US-based subsidiaries like Yen Press and J-Novel Club), but publishers are unambiguously in the Creator/ namespace.

(Edit: Clarifying what I meant in the last paragraph.)

Edited by SamCurt on Jun 4th 2023 at 10:06:17 AM

American film labels are Creator pages, regardless if they're a subbrand of a larger studio.

Touchstone Pictures

So are streaming services like Disney+, but I assume those will be moved to Platforms/?

Also, Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko is a separate light novel imprint — owned by the same company as Dengeki Bunko, Kadokawa. I don't really see the point of having two separate pages with stub descriptions, and then link them to a creator page that will repeat those exact same stubs when explaining the company's history.

There has been no discussion on moving streaming services to Platform/, unless I missed a crowner somewhere.

I'm not sure why that description wouldn't apply to streaming services? They are apps/websites that allow people to experience creative works.

Agreed; streaming services is the first thing that come in mind from the description. But that's outside the scope of this thread.

Even so, is it appropriate to combine all Kadokawa properties into one page though? It has the potential to be a really huge index. Same apply the other giants in this area (Shogakukan, Shueisha and Kodansha)

We can split them up again as-needed. Maybe break by medium, stuff that was Manga First on a separate subpage from stuff that was Anime First and stuff that was Light Novel first.

Also back when Shonen Jump was published in English, it was primarily but not only manga: they also tended to include a couple articles per issue on Japanese culture, like "how to spell your name in katakana" and so forth. Things like that could be tropeable.

Yen Press's Yen Plus magazine didn't.

Edited by StarSword on Jun 6th 2023 at 11:10:47 AM

Hmm.

Lots of anthology comics have at least a little bit of non-comics stuff to bulk up the page count, as text is cheaper and faster to produce than comics art. Doesn't mean they aren't comic books.

If it was up to me, we would have a single Comic/ namespace covering all comics, but it's not up to me. I don't see anything wrong with keeping such pages in Magazine/ or moving them to Manga/ if they're mostly manga, and just treating them as index pages. Tropes which occur frequently can be listed under the individual manga titles, as is done on Comicbook.Two Thousand AD, as Mrph 1 pointed out.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Jun 6th 2023 at 7:50:46 PM

The problem is that nobody outside of Japan reads manga magazines. Shonen Jump is the only one popular enough to be published in English. For everything else, individual manga are consumed in the west as either trade paperbacks or unofficial scanlations. Unlike 2000AD, where it's a cultural icon to an English-speaking country, non-Japanese people know basically nothing about what it's like to actually read a manga magazine.

Most of their pages right now have about two short paragraphs explaining how the publisher started it. If I create a Creator page for the publisher, the intro will explain that exact same information. It's duplicated information, for a page that's inherently hard to trope.

Edited by WarriorsGate on Jun 6th 2023 at 3:27:39 AM

But that then risks becoming a decision based on notability, doesn't it? Which is one of the things TV Tropes always tries to avoid.

Most of them fail the three trope requirement, so they're eligible for deletion anyway. I don't think notability is a problem here, since the information would be moved to a Creator page which doesn't have a minimum trope requirement.

Consider the following example page, which is what inspired me to bring this up in the first place.

Two duplicates from Manga Time Kirara, one original, and no tropes. That's barely even a stub.

Edited by WarriorsGate on Jun 6th 2023 at 3:55:03 AM

If we do go the lump route, how about this?

• Make Magazine/<title> and Manga/<title> as redirects to Creator/<publisher>
• Divide Creator/<publisher> into sections for each comic book.
• If any comic book section gets long enough, spin it out into its own page.

Started putting together a list of who owns what. Japanese Publishers

That's pretty much what I was thinking.

Edited by WarriorsGate on Jun 8th 2023 at 4:58:06 AM

I suppose this is like what we're doing with Square Enix then?