Forum - View topic

The Mike Toole Show - Jump-ing Ship

Viz launched a companion magazine, Shojo Beat, to showcase more shoujo and josei manga. That magazine wasn't quite as robust as Shonen Jump; it folded in 2009. You could probably ascribe some of that lack of staying power to the sad, weird fact that, as a demographic set, shoujo manga has faded a lot over the past decade. There's not as much of it being made anymore, because an awful lot of young girls who used to read stuff like Absolute Boyfriend now just read the likes of One Piece and Nisekoi.

lumranmayasha asked:

Mike Toole made questionable statements about the reason why the Shojo Beat magazine was cancelled in his latest column. He said "You could probably ascribe some of that lack of staying power to the sad, weird fact that, as a demographic set, shojo manga has faded a lot over the past decade. There's not as much of it being made anymore, because an awful lot of young girls who used to read stuff like Absolute Boyfriend now just read the likes of One Piece and Nisekoi." This is nonsense, right?

officialshojobeat answered:

You are correct–that is not why Shojo Beat magazine was cancelled. In 2009, most anime and manga magazines (actually, most print magazines and newspapers across the board) were having a hard time of it, and many went defunct. I think there may be only one anime-related print magazine still alive today. Shojo Beat magazine was doing okay, but the future of magazines was (and still is) bleak. In addition, with the rise of piracy, the manga bubble bursting, and Borders flirting with bankruptcy at the time, management decided to discontinue the magazine and make Shonen Jump digital-only with mostly manga and very few articles. I want to stress that Shojo Beat magazine was an immense amount of work–it had an entire department dedicated to everything that wasn’t manga in that magazine. Most magazines at VIZ in the past were axed to make way for a new magazine or endeavor, but after 2009 they didn’t pursue print magazines anymore.

As for shojo manga not being made anymore–that is ridiculous. Although readership for manga magazines in Japan has been in decline for many years (shonen and shojo), all the major shojo magazines are still around as they have been for decades. One trend that I think makes shojo series harder to discover over here is that fewer shojo series are adapted into anime. Most Japanese publishers prefer to make live-action dramas and movies from shojo manga instead. So we don’t see these titles as anime, which is much more accessible for fans in the US. But the insinuation that girls have given up shojo because it’s somehow a lesser genre than shonen is what I think is sticking in your craw. Shonen manga has always gotten the lion’s share in promotion and publicity, and shonen publishers have been reaching out to female audiences for a long time because they are a huge part of their readership. But shojo manga still endures, and we are still here. ()v

-Editor Nancy