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Wedding Peach’s Multiple Serializations

March 4, 2010 in Manga by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 1 comment

In an attempt to get some use of my Anime Network subscription, I recently started watching Wedding Peach and noticed the above list of magazines in the opening credits.

I had heard of Chao (actually Ciao), a shoujo magazine targeted at young girls – its current series include Gokujo!! Mecha Mote Iincho (the 2nd season of the Mecha Mote anime debuts in April) and Kirarin Revolution ended last June. However, I was unsure about the others until I did some research.

In addition to the original Wedding Peach manga serialization in Ciao, there were variations that ran in the “Journal of Learning” series of publications (小学館の学習雑誌) aimed at grade school students. The Third Grader version was the same as the original but the rest had different illustrators/authors: the Study Kindergarten and First Grader versions were done by Konomichi Ayumi, the Second Grader version by Fujii Midori, and the Fourth Grader version by Tachibana Mami.

I was unable to find a Sprout magazine – there is a manga called Sprout by Atsuko Nanba – and Kindergarten (幼稚園) seems like it’d be similiar to Study Kindergarten (学習幼稚園) except with maybe less of a focus of writing. Wedding Peach ran in the former from May 1995 to April 1996.

(My main source was this section of the Wedding Peach article on Wikipedia Japan. Please correct me if I misinterpreted parts of it.)

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Manga Twister’s Genre-Switching Warnings

September 22, 2009 in Manga by Tom Langston (calaggie) | No comments

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.

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Another Anime Magazine Folds: Anime Insider

March 27, 2009 in Commentary by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 2 comments

News came yesterday from former Anime Insider editor Rob Bricken that the magazine’s current editorial staff has been fired (found via Anime Vice) and the magazine has ceased publication. The April issue, #67, is its last and is currently on sale at newsstands and magazine racks.

While it is easy to point at the availability of news on the Internet and young people’s desires for instant gratification as main reasons (which they are), there is another contributing factor: decreasing advertising revenue across the board for newspapers and periodicals. Along with Anime Insider, it was announced that that same day that Blender would no longer be produced in print form but still maintain its website. Unfortunately, the complete divestment of AI’s staff combined with sluggish online updates rule out a web-only avenue for the brand.

I don’t have many personal feelings toward Anime Insider except for being something I occasionally bought when I saw it on newsstands. They did have interviews and a manga preview in each issue but not much beside that appealed to me on a consistent basis. I will admit that the Flash in Japan made me aware of Flame of Recca (or was it Animerica?) and Kaze no Stigma — FUNimation will release Part 1 of the latter on DVD June 30th. A coupon screw-up by Best Buy in issue #50 happened to provide fuel for a post back in Nov. 2007.

The magazine will be missed as part of a shrinking magazine market (only Otaku USA and Protoculture Addicts, both bi-monthly, remain) but I will not mourn its absence, partly because their final issue is very video game focused. I do wish that the writers are able to find work elsewhere, either in print or online.

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A Few Weeks Late: ‘Monster’ Manga Junot Diaz’s Guilty Pleasure

July 28, 2008 in Manga by Tom Langston (calaggie) | No comments


I was flipping through a recent issue of Time Magazine (July 14th) that was lying around the house and saw a feature called “Famous Authors’ Guilty Pleasures”. What struck me was that Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz chose the Monster manga as his, although I probably shouldn’t have been surprised after reading the front flap of his immigrant-family novel, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao:

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien, and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the fukú — the ancient curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still dreaming of his first kiss, is only its most recent victim — until the fateful summer that he decides to be its last.

Diaz described Monster‘s Johan as “one of the weirdest, most attractive psychotic masterminds in literature” and mentioned other characters like Nina, Inspector Runge and Eva as components of Tenma’s “epic quest”. I am idly interested to see how US sales of the manga are affected by this mention in a mainstream magazine and I might have to take a peek at Oscar Wao because it seems interesting…and because it won an award, like Monster won the 2001 General Shogakukan Manga Award. (I also want to check out The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps for a different reason.)

And yes, I did discover that ANN wrote about this two weeks ago during this post’s composition but it was news to me so I’m posting about it anyway.

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PiQ Premiere Issue Better Than Expected

March 17, 2008 in Impressions by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 1 comment

A few days ago I received the first of four expected issues of PiQ magazine (produced by PiQ, LLC) and after reading most of it, I have to say I am already beginning to prefer it to Newtype USA, its previous anime- and manga-focused iteration. Those two subjects are still covered but the focus of more on a greater variety of entertainment including comics, video games, sci-fi, and American cartoons. For instance, there are features on Appleseed Ex Machina; Avatar, which I still haven’t seen despite many recommendations; Invasion U.S.A., a Marvel comic beginning next month; Code Geass; and the currently on hiatus Sarah Connor Chronicles.
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