german

While looking around for some comics stuff, I came across an issue of Manga Twister I had bought a few years ago in Düsseldorf.

Manga Twister is a now defunct German manga magazine that had six shonen and shojo series in each issue and each half was twisted 180 degrees from the other. Yen Plus has a “reorient your brain” warning in the middle of each issue when the reader finishes the A part (manga) and is ready to move onto the B part (manhwa & OEL/world manga) but it doesn’t have a genre specific warning like Twister did.

If you started with the shonen side, you would see a warning after the end of the last series about the following pages containing sunshine, happiness, romance, and girls. Correspondingly if you began on the shojo side, you’d encounter a similar warning that the pages to follow may have communism, stormy clouds, poison, and males.

In the middle of the issue is where the next one is previewed and where the “twisting” action happens. In the pages surrounding this are a word puzzle contest with prizes, four pages about Milk Crown‘s manga-ka Mizuto Aqua, a reminder of what manga volumes were coming out that March, letters & fanart, and a few ads for other EMA manga (Imadoki!, xxxHolic, Chobits).

If you continued on after twisting, you would see another warning about the content to come. “Achtung! Du betrittst jetzt die Jungs-Zone/Mädchen-Zone! Lesen auf eigene Gefahr!” (Attention! You are now entering the boys’/girls’ zone! Read at your own risk!). These pages are on the other side of the sheet of paper from the “Danger” warnings.

Like I mentioned, Manga Twister is no longer being published by Egmont Manga & Anime (EMA) – its last issue was in October 2006 and the mag lasted three years. There are two German manga magazines currently in circulation: Carlsen’s shojo-oriented Daisuki and Schwarzer Turm’s quarterly Paper Theatre, which features German artists (Germanga?). Manga Power, the first of its kind, ran from 1996 to 1997 and then from 2002 to 2004. Carlsen-run shonen magazine BANZAI! ran from November 2001 to December 2005.