Currently Running Manga Discussion

[VLordGTZ]

This Keijo crap is STILL going on.

I'm just going to throw my hands up on this one. The series didn't sell; Sunday canceled it. This isn't rocket science.

You'd think that people would have made more fuss about Bleach's cancellation if they were this pissed at Keijo's. 

But yeah, people should just realize that this is basic business sense and move on already.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Frog-kun's article is meant to dissuade the idea that Keijo was canceled because its anime under-performed. Which he's right about.

To quote a tweet Maxy made yesterday, "Keijo the comic was cancelled because Keijo the comic under-performed." People are placing too much stock in how well anime did when the manga ended because it just wasn't doing well as a manga.

[LumRanmaYasha]

I normally love SuperEyepatchWolf's videos, but his recent state of Shonen Jump vid was depressingly misinformed and downright bad. The OP sales figures were anomalously high in 2010 because people were binge-buying the backlog thanks to the hype surrounding the Marineford arc. Yes, sales of OP have dramatically declined since then, but that's because that peak was for a dramatic and fleeting moment in time for the series, and it's still blowing away all other manga in sales even now. The declining subscription numbers are noteworthy, but Jump's also been moving digital so you need to take into account the number of people who have moved to online subscriptions from print to get the big picture. You can't just judge series success based on survey results because Jump doesn't strictly arrange the lineup based on popularity, and survey success does not always translate into tankobon sales, which matter so much more. Series that are heading towards their endings like Nisekoi and Toriko were last year and Gintama is now were placed at the back because they're on their way out anyways. And his comments about the recent Jump Starts are particularly aggravating because based on his comments about there only being "one chapter of Poro out" it's clear he didn't do the research and isn't subscribed to the english Shonen Jump, which ran the first three chapters of Poro and have them readily available to read for free on their website! For someone who says he's passionate about Shonen Jump series, he sure doesn't show it by not supporting the official release or putting in the research to know what the official names for series like We Never Learn are.

Clearly the only solution to stop the spread of misinformation like this is for someone who actually supports legal manga and subscribes to the official english Shonen Jump to become a youtuber. ...Goddamit.

EDIT: Here's a great video from another youtuber debunking the whole TOC=popularity poll myth.

[VLordGTZ]

I like SEW's videos, but this was just downright awful.  His "Top 10" Jump series also make no sense since, going by his logic, Kimetsu no Yaiba and Yuna of Yuragi Manor should be higher than Samon.  Not to shit on the guy, but you'd think with how much research he puts into his other videos, he would have made sure to be well informed for such a large topic.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I do like a lot of Super Eyepatch Wolf's content, mostly for the clear passion he has in discussing the series and subjects that matter to him, and I also love a lot of the same series. That said, he has always had an issue of poorly researching background information pertaining to what he talks about, leading to videos that have a certain level of ignorance in what he's talking about. On its own, I wouldn't mind too much, but since he has so many followers, it rapidly spreads this misinformation across the community, which is really a problem.

Also on the subject of Super Eyepatch Wolf, he has another problem that I've been having with most anime and manga YouTubers in general. While I can perfectly respect them having comparatively negative opinions of stuff that I or others like, the way that they elevate the quality of the series that they love by barely touching on its flaws while lazily criticizing only the weaker aspects of series that they aren't a fan of in comparison reeks of double-standards and absolutely drives me up the wall. On this front, SEW isn't nearly as bad as Digibro (who to be clear makes some legit good content, but his criticism videos can be insanely aggravating) or various other YouTubers, but it's still an issue that pops up at least once or twice in every video that he makes.

Comparatively, Mathwiz is an anime YouTuber who generally seems to be a bit more respectful about how he talks about various series, even the ones that he admittedly doesn't care for, though even he can venture into this territory from time to time. I still give him a bit more of a pass, though, since he did do a great video promoting MistareFusion and his Dragon Ball Dissection series.

I think what bugs me about how such criticism is handled, though, is that you can criticize something without trying to paint it out as dumb or inherently inferior which can feel rather insulting to anyone who likes it for different reasons. And I'm not insinuating that it's the intention of any of these YouTubers (well, not for most of them, anyways) to misinform or insult the intelligence of any of their audience, but rather that some of the ways in which they compose their criticisms can certainly come off that way.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Yeah, negative comparisons are a lazy and abused form of criticism. I've been guilty of it myself in the past when criticizing series like Bleach and Fairy Tail, but it's important to recognize a double-standard and avoid putting another series you like on a pedestal solely to devalue one you don't. There's smarter ways of getting a point across than calling people who like something you don't dumb.

[Avaitor]

A friend of mine posted this video, and I noticed some things that seemed off, but I'm not as familiar with the manga industry or Jump's readership status to call it out. I'm glad to see that there are logical explanations for why this was wrong.

[LumRanmaYasha]

On another note, I'm writing Weekly Shonen Jump reviews again! I'm posting them on All-Comic now since I've been writing a lot of reviews for them recently and I felt like it made sense to have all my manga reviews/podcasts centralized in one place. I've just posted my review of last week's bonus issue, and hope to make After the Jump a regular series again, so check them out if you're interested!

[Spark Of Spirit]

This video feels like it was written in a bubble. I've been seeing it all over the place and a lot of people are tearing into it. With good reason.

There's no point even mentioning Samon over Kimetsu no Yaiba and Yuna (which the video utterly ignores?) since it's not a hit in any sense and is wrapping up and the other two have outranked it utterly in sales and popularity.

How do Naruto and Bleach ending make it feel like something is afoot in the magazine? They ended. Their stories were completed. Just like every series that has run since the magazine started. If anything Naruto and Bleach should have ended years ago but sales were why they stuck around.

He also spoke too early on old series losing popularity and new series gaining it. Food Wars still sells as much as ever and the rankings are back to normal. World Trigger's last ranking before hiatus was at #1 and it was consistently in the top 5 before then. Haikyu rotates all over the top ten and always has. Hinomaru ranks around the middle to near the top. Promised Neverland, Black Clover, and KnY are the only newer series to consistently rank high. He really should have looked at 2017 data before making his points.

Toriko's sales stagnated after the anime ended and quickly lost popularity. Gintama has been winding down for over a year now. The reason these series are ending is not a mystery. Kochikame was for the 40th anniversary and to give him a chance to do something new. Assassination Classroom and Nisekoi also ended their stories.

There's no pattern here except the coincidence of so many series reaching the end at the same time. Why did he try to insinuate anything else other than the obvious?

And once again, no one ever points out the most obvious problem with comparing sales. We don't know how much digital volumes sell. Japan is way more into digital content than any other country. All magazines and print volumes are on a sales decline. This is well known. But you can't just ignore digital sales when it comes to Japan. That's a pretty big deal when discussing sales. But it is never brought up when discussing how Jump is doing. Series hit sales peaks, and that was One Piece's. Magi, Seven Deadly Sins, Fairy Tail, and other popular series all had the same thing happen. This isn't even factoring in Marineford and the Strong World event which even non-fans like me remember. There's nothing mysterious here.

This whole video is a whole lot of nothing. But then I find SEW really likes to do things that reinforce his already made up opinion a lot of the time.

[LumRanmaYasha]

I really wish publishers started reporting their digital sales figures. It would be really helpful to contextualize how series are doing relative to each other more accurately, since declining print sales just don't reflect the big picture and how digital is slowly becoming the method of choice for consuming manga over print media.  If we had that data, it would be really easy to correct and dispel the misinformed theories that SEW and others have perpetuated. His video really is more of a conspiracy theory characterized by confirmation bias over concrete facts.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Great set of chapters this week. MHA, TPN, and Dr. Stone in particular were really strong. I also really liked the bizarre plot turn in Black Clover; the series is always at its best when it tries being more comedic.

But I still have no idea what's happening in Seraph. I lost the plot string a while back.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Weekly Shonen Jump Issue #24 (May 11th, 2017):
Kimetsu no Yaiba: Blade of Demon Destruction (Cover, Lead CP)
1. Haikyu!!
2. One Piece
The Promised Neverland (CP)
3. Dr. Stone
Spring Weapon No. 1 (CP)
4. My Hero Academia
5. Hinomaru Zumou
6. Black Clover
Robot x Laserbeam (CP)
7. Yuna of Yuragi Manor
8. Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Souma
9. Gintama
10. The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.
11. We Never Learn
12. Samon the Summoner
13. Hungry Marie
14. Demon Prince Poro's Diaries
15. U19
Chronicle of Isobe ~Life is Hard~

Next week Saiki gets the cover and Yuna and Haikyu get color pages. Great to see Dr. Stone successful, but it looks like three of the new series were not very well liked, one is middling so far, and the other two seem to be decent hits. Though I'm still wondering how many new series will show up in the next round.

[Daikun]

Bye bye Fairy Tail.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I've never been able to get into Fairy Tail. I've tried multiple times since it started and I just can't do it.

Mashima is good artist and character designer, but his writing leaves a lot to be desired. Crap like "Because she's Erza" is the epitome of everything people dislike about shonen. His writing devolved since Rave Master, and it's really hard to stomach.

He'd honestly have to do a lot of convincing for me to be excited for whatever he does next.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, the most recent chapter of Food Wars really sums up my problems with the whole Central Saga in general: Soma and his friends are put in situations where they have to win otherwise there's no way that the plot can move forward, and despite going up against high level opponents, they are subject to glaring oversites that cost them the match. There is absolutely no way that a Soba expert, whether traditional or not, wouldn't take into consideration how the temperature of the room would affect the quality of the dish, especially when Soma was able to consider that. And don't use the defense that Soma knew because he served customers on a regular basis. Even if Nene never did that, she was trained in the same way that previous generations of her family had been trained, and you can't tell me that none of them knew about how the season could affect the flavor of their ingredients.

This is just really contrived writing due to a very poor set up and foundation for the villains. Essentially, Central has been put in a position where they have to lose, and thus the only way to do that without making the main characters look ridiculously overpowered is to make the lower to mid-level Elite Council characters look uncharacteristically incompetent in one way or another.

I really just hope that we can move past this arc as quickly as possible and hopefully get back to better stuff.