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Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Raijin Comics

When Viz lost the Fist license, a few months before Raijin started, we had a "Goodbye Fist of the North Star" party where we filled a Kenshiro pinata with blood-colored candy and beat it to a pulp while watching the Streamline Pictures dub of the 1985 Fist movie.

I suspect that if it wasn't for the desire to crotch-punch their ex-coworkers and prove to them that Jump is awesomer and you can't escape us even if you go to America, Shueisha might never have purchased a 50% stake in Viz and launched the American version of Shonen Jump that same year.

The fierce rivalry between Raijin and Jump can be seen by this email that I received

Still, if you were a subscriber, or you were able to make it to a comic store every week to pick it up, Raijin was your fix for a VERY Japanese-manga-esque experience.

(You probably had to find it at a comic store; unlike Shonen Jump, Gutsoon! didn't have the connections to get it widely distributed in bookstores and grocery stores and so on.)

Unlike Hara and Hojo, he managed to get back on good terms with Viz and Shueisha after his fling with Coamix, and as a result Viz has continued to publish his manga and did a license rescue of Slam Dunk.

The Coamix/Gutsoon! folks chose to release the original Fist as oversize, colored graphic novels—looking a LOT like Chinese martial arts comics—

The pulp setting, plus the fact that the main character pretends to be a mild-mannered professor when he's not beating up bad dudes, makes me think it was influenced by Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The adventure-comedy story of Ryo Saeba, a hired gun who's got insanely good aim and a love for the ladies, it was incredibly popular in East Asia—check out the insane Jackie Chan film adaptation—but never quite made it big in the States.

Incidentally, American manga companies had tried to get the rights to translate City Hunter before Raijin, in the '80s, but Hojo had put his foot down with the demand that his manga had to be published in he original right-to-left format.

One of them, Makoto Niwano's "amoral girl with big boobs killing and torturing people" violence-comedy Bomber Girl, is so awful that I assume it got published because Niwano jumped into an icy river to save Hara and Hojo from drowning.

the US government, and terrorists. Revenge of Mouflon is clearly a Japanese response to the 9/11 plane hijackings (with the wishful ending of the plane not crashing), mixing anti-big-government views, political commentary and conspiracy theories with high-volume melodrama and heroic idealism. It's a fascinating mix with good artwork.

(Of course, it has a very negative view of the American government, but hey: this is Japanese manga you're reading. JAPANESE manga. Not American manga. So get used to it.)

Also, it ends very abruptly; I had to check to make sure I really had the last volume.

Basically, Raijin was a seinen manga magazine competing in a shonen and shojo world, and their attempt to appeal to older American comic book readers (as opposed to Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon kids) was unsuccessful.

Raijin did attempt to make themselves cuter and balance out the overwhelming machismo by publishing some love-comedy manga like Minene Sakurano's Guardian Angel Getten (the fifth core title) and, later, the dog manga Bow Wow Wata, but even these manga looked dated. With these cute manga next to Fist of the Blue Sky, the result was a schizo "What magazine am I reading?" effect, kind of like when Parasyte and Sailor Moon were published side-by-side in Mixx Zine.

Secondly, Shonen Jump simply had much more money and exposure.

Oddly, it was never released in graphic novel form, unlike the other Raijin manga; who knows why Itagaki didn't give them the graphic novel rights.

How could this lineup possibly fail? Well…Raijin lasted 46 issues, switched from a weekly to a monthly format midway through, and collapsed completely in 2004.

By any factor, it was impossible to imagine Shonen Jump not being more successful. Of course, this can't be directly blamed for Raijin's failure, as the audiences and contents of the magazine were so different;

classic oldschool titles like Fist of the North Star and City Hunter could never be big hits the way they were in Japan in the '80s.

Do you think the reason the appeal was so minimal was because the U.S. and Japanese societies had different likes and dislikes going on in the 80s?

I do hope someday that City Hunter and Fist of the Blue Sky get complete English releases.

...I hope that someday I'll see the big faces of Kenshiro and Saeba (and Baki) once again floating in the sky, or at least floating online, all '70s shonen manga style.

Do you think the reason the appeal was so minimal was because the U.S. and Japanese societies had different likes and dislikes going on in the 80s? Nostalgia is a powerful factor, but it doesn't necessarily grab everyone.