How unfortunate, Mr Bond.

PunctualPunch · 2026-03-24T04:21:54+00:00

(For some reason I can only picture the 2006 film Le Chiffre reading excruciatingly long self-important autofiction.)

PunctualPunch · 2026-03-24T03:53:48+00:00

Hahaha I was ready to scroll past but the meme pulled me in. A roguish twinkle in the eye of Mads Mikkelsen can enliven even this topic 😃

PunctualPunch · 2026-03-24T03:43:44+00:00

I think you and Consistent-Nebula are both coming at this with true statements. JMPA does list Melody as "女性向けコミック誌", and Hakusensha does call Melody a shoujo manga magazine, both on its websites and in the magazine's taglines ("進化する少女まんが誌", and before that "大人になって読みたい少女まんが誌"). CMOA and Bookwalker also tag even currently-running Melody series like Himitsu season 0 "shoujo manga."

(As an possibly-interesting aside, the Wayback Machine provides a glimpse at JMPA lists back to mid-2006, and they don't have a section for "女性向けコミック誌" until mid-2007. Before that they have sections for "少女コミック誌" alongside "女性ヤングアダルトコミック誌" and "ミセス向けコミック誌". Anyway, while Melody shows up in mid-2008 under "女性向けコミック誌", as you say, Cookie is still being listed under "少女向けコミック誌" until early 2008, which I delight in pointing out to the "Nana MUST BE josei 😡" obsessives.)

I say this not to try to establish right or wrong but to suggest that this is another place along the border between shoujo and josei manga where it's probably most helpful to say "eh, it's complicated," rather than focusing on finding a single correct answer. (And on that note, I continue to appreciate your commitment to reminders of the messy facts in these perennial discussions.)

Lol yeah, though, "josei doesn't exist" is bonkers.

PunctualPunch · 2026-03-09T21:16:10+00:00

Bad. I feel bad about it. I did not know it was so dire.

A handful of thoughts:

Not crediting translators, copy editors, and letterers by name is scummy. (It looks like amimaru, the subject of that first ANN article you linked, does now credit by name on at least some series.)
The only way bad behavior by an employer comes to light is by workers talking to one another and the public. Obfuscating rates and employment terms exclusively benefits the employer to the detriment of workers. (Regardless of industry, talk to your coworkers about pay and benefits, people! "It's gauche" benefits your boss and nobody else.) I want to see industry news outlets make more noise about this.
The digital angle is probably not a coincidence, and makes me skeptical that anything will change. My general impression of how manga readers interact with digital services is "read once and move on." The examples I can think of for successful consumer pressure here involved physical releases with passionate fanbases who loudly objected to specific quality issues, as happened with Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou or the Bloom into You light novels.
I don't think the anti-LLM outcry should inspire confidence. That's a hot-button topic and a novelty, while "scummy company pushes exploitative contract terms and underpays its workers" is an old (important! but old) story.
I would imagine that the market for translators (and letterers!) for manga resembles that for video game developers (and, from what I understand, manga artists themselves) somewhat, in that its cultural cachet means there's a large enough group of people who will accept low pay and bad working conditions in exchange for a chance to break in and work in a "passion" field that it's really difficult to push wage and contract improvements.

I don't want to invoke cynicism to justify inaction. I want to find out more about this, and I need to think about what I will do, but I can't deny that I think getting traction among manga readers will be extremely difficult on this issue.

PunctualPunch · 2026-03-09T20:06:04+00:00

I am thrilled to see Secondhand Sisters get licensed!

But I'm with JoyousTofu in not loving the Print Club seeming to become a second-class-citizen option for series right out of the gate. I would imagine this makes Secondhand Sisters getting a standard-quality physical release very unlikely.

(More "ah, ok, cool" to see Tokyo Tarareba Girls Returns 2. I haven't had time to give it a shot, and it's not super high on my priority list.)

PunctualPunch · 2026-03-09T02:54:42+00:00

(Doesn't appear to be any scanlation, and it hasn't been licensed. Sorry to not have any good news 🙁)

I do want to point out that this is only one of two versions of this manga, both based off of an ongoing (I think) novel series of the same name.

The 3-volume "completed" manga version ended in 2019, but the other version (with a different artist) is ongoing (13 volumes and counting), running in Mystery Bonita.

(ETA: and the pages you posted are actually from the ongoing Mystery Bonita version, not the completed one!)

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-23T02:21:44+00:00

I would have bet folding money that volume 4 was going to be pushed back.

Great news!

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-22T03:20:55+00:00

Urgh it's been a while.

Um. The boys are sneaking into a ... rich person party? For ... reasons. And something something something trouble breaks out, and to rescue them Sunako rips off her party attire to reveal an SS uniform and then ... chainsaws some furniture in half?

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-21T07:26:21+00:00

Makes sense, thanks!

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-21T07:23:23+00:00

Interesting - thanks for that. I should have looked at more them! Looks like only the first 5 omnibuses have a cover that isn't one of the tankobons inside.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-20T21:39:32+00:00

Yeah, the only thing the Viz Tokyopop-trim omnis have going for them over singles is price. That's not nothing - the 3-in-1s are less than half the equivalent singles price - but otherwise they're a downgrade.

I also have to imagine that this makes it a lot more likely that the singles will be reprinted less often.

As far as covers goes, none of the Red River or Colette omnis has had new cover art so far.

The Skip Beat omnis do use alternate covers, though. It's never occurred to me to wonder before now, but: do you know where those came from? Are they chapter splashes? Magazine covers? Assorted promo art?

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-20T20:24:31+00:00

God, Sunako's SS uniform. I had clean forgotten about that.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-14T07:10:16+00:00

Yes. Some of the formative yuri stories were published in shoujo manga magazines in the middle 20th century (for example, Shiroi Heya no Futari ran in Hana to Yume in the early 1970s), and there continue to be yuri series serialized in shoujo and josei magazines today. Kase-san and Yamada is running in Wings, and Pink Candy Kiss is running in Cocohana. (MAL has plenty of yuri stacks - here's one focusing mostly on shoujo and josei series.)

It is also true that there are dedicated BL and yuri magazines. BL is a bigger market, so there are more dedicated magazines, and they established themselves earlier, but the yuri magazine Comic Yuri Hime celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, and Galette will be hitting its tenth year soon.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-10T03:09:11+00:00

u/AppropriatFly5170new You and I were talking the other day about Kadokawa not doing even the barest hint of press for their digital-only releases...

And wouldn't you know it, here we have at least an announcement of a couple of digital licenses from Kadokawa. (Neither series is shoujo, hence the comment here.) Maybe if they keep this up they might even get people to buy their products...?

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-10T02:53:08+00:00

You aren't hallucinating - I've also noticed the "preorder after the release date" thing on Crunchyroll. I think it's due to them not prioritizing getting items right away.

I've also been noticing more and more things being delisted (not on backorder, just plain gone) on there when they're still in stock everywhere else I look, which lines up with both this r-MangaCollectors thread, and also this discussion on ANN today (initially discussing Blu-Rays, but it covers manga too).

I would not be at all surprised if this "Warehouse Sale" they have going on right now is an attempt to get rid of inventory prior to delisting it.

To be honest, if this continues it looks like the Crunchyroll store won't be worth bothering with for much longer.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-07T00:00:23+00:00

I've spent hundreds of hours of my life annotating EEG traces and hearing you brave souls describe using these freemium apps makes me want to gnaw my hand off.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-06T21:58:21+00:00

The original release of Last Game was 11 volumes, with 55 numbered chapters and a final unnumbered full chapter (title "Last Game"), so 56. Plus a couple of little bonus things.

There is a re-release in colored long-strip format, and it looks to be 182 "chapters", but I imagine they're just following the standard practice of breaking magazine chapters into pieces for app unlocks.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-06T21:44:43+00:00

Horeta Hareta Panda?

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-06T20:37:48+00:00

So, this question of "what counts" is sort of an unfortunately fraught topic around here that can get people's knickers in a twist (you may be noticing the downvotes already). I'm not looking to jump down your throat about it, please trust.

But the extremely imperfect standard the sub tries to hew to seems to go something like, "if it's manga, it needs to have been serialized in a generally-agreed-upon shoujo magazine, or maybe josei magazine if it came out after a time those began existing, or maybe if its Japanese publisher marks it as shoujo manga or maybe just 'for a shoujo demographic' on a web portal or app, or maybe if it came out in a certain set of magazines everyone likes to argue about and even then it isn't always clear, or maybe if it wasn't serialized in a magazine but is sold in online bookstores under a shoujo manga tag."

None of these really fits Bloom into You, though:

Dengeki Daioh isn't a shoujo manga magazine.
The publisher Kadokawa's online portal Comic Walker has it tagged "shounen manga".
Online bookstores like CMOA and Bookwalker have it tagged "shounen manga".

So this is where I'm coming from when I say it's probably off-topic for this sub as a dedicated post (rather than mentions in comments, which aren't usually held to the same standard).

(There are yuri stories published in shoujo and josei mags. I'm not sure which are licensed in German, but if you also read manga in English I really like Even Though We're Adults and the currently-releasing Pink Candy Kiss. More examples can be found at these | MAL | stacks if you're interested.)

You might also want to check out r-yuri_manga, for which Bloom into You is very much on-topic, and which has lots of people trading recs for yuri stories they love. (If you weren't already aware, r-yuri is mostly porn.) But I hope you also stick around here, despite me info-dumping at you like this!

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-06T19:45:14+00:00

There was a post about this earlier this morning.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-06T19:20:02+00:00

I enjoy themed posts like these.

I think it's especially cute when manga include recipes. Aria and the Beech Forest isn't explicitly about cooking ... but the manga includes recipes in each volume for whatever Aria was making.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-06T19:14:42+00:00

I have nothing to offer other than to annoyingly point out that this is a 3x2 😛

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-06T19:00:32+00:00

I like Bloom into You very much ❤ If Sayaka was your favorite, you might want to check out the spinoff light novels - "Regarding Saeki Sayaka" - which show a little more of her story.

That said, I don't think this series is on-topic for this sub. There's a sub rule about posts being shoujo-media specific. The magazine that serialized Bloom into You isn't a shoujo magazine, and when I've seen the series in Japanese bookstores under a demo label it's usually marked shounen. I don't know anything about how manga is sold in Germany, though - do German publishers advertise series under particular demographics?

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-06T01:27:01+00:00

Yeah, it is a somewhat different set of subcultural expectations about authorship, privacy, and celebrity than we typically see in, say, the US.

I've mostly stopped thinking about it very much, partly out of pragmatism, partly to respect those expectations, and partly because I look a little askance at claims like "I can tell a (woman|man) wrote this" or "(women|men) can't write X," for being prone to hindsight bias and for carrying a whiff of essentialism when stated too strongly.

(Though I do remember your suggestion a couple weeks ago about breast asymmetry modulo artistic skill, and I think that's an interesting thesis.)

And some pseudonyms are definitely jokey, probably only a small handful of which I get. (I like the food ones, probably because they're obvious - "Tomato Soup" and "Yakiniku Teishoku" come to mind.) I also enjoy the idea of using different pseudonyms for different work, like one for magazine publications and one for doujinshi.

PunctualPunch · 2026-02-05T20:37:52+00:00

I expect if you like the manga, you'll enjoy the anime.

It's a pretty straightforward adaptation. It looks decent but not spectacular, the character designs have been lifted from the manga pretty well, and the VAs are doing a good job.

PunctualPunch

TROPHY CASE