If I have to notice it, then so does everyone else.
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i think the light sources might be different for each part lol. youāre right that it looks weird. alsoā¦ komi thighsā¦ no, komiā¦
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Canāt wait to see what you do discover, as Jintor said this looks legend
I was trying to maintain an illusion that it was not part of her and you crushed that 
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So I read Rock a Rock and the Occult camera one! And Iāve officially graduated to read Sunday weekly!!!
The return of Magic Kaito! Its been a long time coming! Obviously he has appeared in many Conan stories, but he hasnāt had his own time to shine in ages! It is 100% in hype for the new conan movie which comes out this weekend!!!
Rock a Rock Quick Thoughts:
Simple yet charming coming of age music story about a kid who loves rock music despite changing tastes of everyone around him. A hint of mystery, but seems really standard so far. I want to see if there is a twist coming up!!
The Ghost Doesnāt Show Up Quick Thoughts:
Pretty creepy art let down by the fact I cannot stand looking at the main girls mouth. Is that small, irrational, and petty, yes, but I just hate it so much. Donāt really like the characters except for her ghost dad who is pretty funny.
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I wanted to share in this thread along with the Harta-specific one that I finally did what Iād been meaning to do for a while and organize up a blog post format for myself that Iām hoping will let me take notes on manga magazines a bit more efficiently and share them a little more widely!
Hereās the first post of what Iām hoping will be more to come, on Septemberās Harta. For the format I tried to balance my usual Harta notes with that big exhaustive rundown I did a while back that people seemed to enjoy, and I at least enjoyed making this post, and hope to catch up with Harta and read and share about other magazines using the format at more of a regular rate than Iāve managed before. Weāll see how it goes though!
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Iām keeping up okay so far with my plan of posting manga magazine notes on mondays, and hereās my first non-Harta one of those: notes on my first issue of AX!
AX is an underground/alternative manga magazine, so if youāre curious about the strange and sometimes off-putting world of the comics cutting edge, and donāt mind the format of reading someoneās vicarious notes about something, perhaps youād find it interesting.
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Forecast for my actually managing to completely smoothly stick with the arbitrary weekly schedule I had in mind isnāt the best, but the short length of AX certainly helps and hereās notes on another one.
I think thisāll be my reply limit unless someone else posts, but if they donāt you should be able to find similar manga magazine summaries at least pretty frequently on Mondays on that notion page!
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Iām replying just to enable you to post again.
I bought Harta backlog way back when, but it hasnāt been on the top of my pile. Instead I end up accidentally reading half of ęåććć°ć¬ć³ć¬ć³ each month after finishing the series I follow way too quicklyā¦
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I have a general manga magazine question - do mangaka plan their episodes based on expected breakpoints in later collected volumes? Iām guessing the answer is, some do some donāt, but who knows, maybe there is something more insightful there, i.e., some editorial assistance as surely the publisher has a vested interested in collected volumes that sell well later.
As I read more and more in Harta itās becoming something of a revelation. For some manga like Frieren, the concept of manga magazines gave me an aha moment, perhaps thatās why Frierenās arcs arenāt volume based (at least as far as I can tell so far). In the original magazine publication, the timing of cliffhangers or big reveals episode to episode doesnāt have as much of an impact. But later when the chapters get collected it makes a big difference if youāre waiting until the middle of Volume 2 to āgetā it. So Frieren feels like an example where the mangaka was more focused on laying out the world and story independently of later volumes. On the other hand, I thought at the end of Volume 1 of ę“ćØć¹ć¼ćć, a big reveal was well timed to keep readers interested and if it had been one chapter later (bumped to Vol 2), perhaps the series would have lost readers in that format. Given manga volumes are predictable in length, I can imagine the artist was already imagining how it would be published later.
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I donāt have a lot of experience with manga magazines but itās certainly how it worked for French/Belgian bandes dessinĆ©es back in the heydays of Spirou, Tintin magazine and Pilote. The more āseriousā and story-driven entries like Asterix or Tintin were clearly storyboarded with the full volume in mind, and then broken down in weekly āchaptersā (although BD donāt always delineate chapters).
But then you also have content thatās clearly just created one week at a time without real āarcsā and those just eventually get collected in volumes once they get enough pages. Gaston is like this for instance.
Donāt American comics work like this? I know very little about comics but I always assumed that it was similar.
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Thatās neat, I had no idea that Asterix and Tintin came from magazines!
hmmmā¦ ok, I only know newspaper comics, I have no idea about Marvel or any kind of magazine so Iām afraid Iām not much help
Summary about newspaper comics but I'm not sure it's relevant
At least when I was a kid, the comics in a newspaper ran daily (B&W) and color (weekend). Reaching back, the dailies were perhaps 1 page. Each comic just gets a half page length strip of about 3 panels (here is a representative one). Then the color Sunday comics were maybe 4 pages? And bigger, so perhaps 3 lines, but I donāt quite remember and I couldnāt find a good photo online. These do get collected in volumes, but for the most part didnāt have overarching stories (think Snoopy and Calvin & Hobbes), although there were a couple that did have arcs, but I never read those since I had no idea what was going on.
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IIRC Tintin was published like this in Le Soir for a long time, one page at a time. Thatās why if you look at (most?) Tintin volumes, you have one, often minor cliffhanger at the end of every single page in order to have people come back for the next issue.
Yeah thatās certainly the flaw in the whole conceptā¦
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Probably depends also on how often magazines are coming out, popularity of series, experience of editors, if theyāre willing to give mangaka time to plot things out etc as well
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Yeah I wonder! Reading a manga magazine definitely leads to interesting speculation about stuff like that but it can be surprisingly hard to notice reading month-to-month even relatively straightforward mechanical stuff like how long chapters are each issue and how much it varies. And I donāt as of now have any other insight to add about the industry from other sources.
My gut feeling is that at least for something like Harta, the month-to-month pacing is probably the more major concern mostly, but volume breaks are probably planned out to be smooth around that too. Like flipping through Dungeon Meshi volumes as a nearby quick data source, they all tend to have 7 chapters, and usually donāt have multipart chapters with the same title split across volumes (except e.g. a denouement at the start of 5 after a climax in 4 or near the end of the series as things build to a finale). Or if I remember right, Hakumei to Mikochi is basically completely episodic, but thereās one volume in the middle thatās entirely devoted to a multipart story which I didnāt like as muchā¦.
This is complete speculation, but I also get the impression that probably virtually any given series as it starts out is on uncertain grounds in terms of how many volumes it will get in the end, and reader feedback and sales of the first volume I assume play into that decision. Thatās just based on the open-ended feeling of the pacing on most series as they begin, and how it feels honestly pretty rare that the timing of a series ending feels 100% definitely planned far in advance. So I at least donāt get the impression that an author starts a series planning out the major beats of every future volume. Who knows though - again thatās just speculation. You gotta assume they (and their editors) do at least think about and discuss it somewhat throughout the process.
One mildly interesting note to add is how some seriesā volumes vary pretty significantly in size - like Dorohedoro starts with thin volumes that get gradually wider eventually. I dunno if thatās evidence in the planned column or the unplanned column though!
American comics donāt have anything like manga magazines in the way that SeanBones was originally talking about. Here the primary way the industry works is comics are sold individually as $3 (in my headā¦ itās been a long time since I bought single issues and itās definitely at least $4 or $5 now) single issues (āfloppiesā) which are on glossy color paper and have typically around 22 pages continuing a particular story and which you usually buy or subscribe to at a comic book store. These are then periodically compiled into trade paperback volumes collecting 5 or so single issues into a book format which are also sold in the graphic novel section of bookstores.
In some ways certainly itās similar, but since the original installments are single issue, if you want to try lots of series, you have to subscribe to lots of series and pay for a lot of single issues, and itās always tempting to drop a series if you arenāt into it. I get the impression thereās also a lot of less-than-ideal weird industry quirks like how thereās only one major distributor for the industry (which just went bankruptā¦) and how Iāve heard that the way publishers track sales of single issues is rather arcane and it only ācountsā in terms of their metrics for whether to continue a series or not if you specifically pre-order the issues at your local store, not if you buy it off the shelf.
So anyway, for someone generally interested in keeping abreast of whatās going on in comics, itās definitely alluring from an American perspective to imagine say, if Marvel or Image or what-have-you released a big cheap black and white tome of say like, everything out that month in the Spider-Man line or whatever that you could pick up and discover new comics and stay up to date for like a single $5-12 price or whatever a month, manga magazine style, instead of like 10 different $4 subscriptions.
As for the discussion at hand about whether authors plan for the collected editions, that definitely does happen in modern American comics! Nowadays when the direct market of comic book stores hasnāt been in the best of shape for decades and newstands are defunct, itās hard to argue that the trade paperbacks arenāt far more important in most respects and more convenient than the single issues (even if translated manga tankobans still largely eat their lunch in terms of sales and shelf space), and starting around the 2000s or so āwriting for the tradesā entered the lexicon in the industry/fandom to refer negatively to authors ignoring the pacing of single issues and focusing exclusively on the structure of the collected volumes, meaning if you did buy the floppies, you might waste a few dollars on a meandering decompressed 22 pages where nothing significant happens at all.
In general I would say though that in mainstream superhero comics in particular, where creative teams change on single books, publisher-mandated crossover events happen all the time, and shared continuity across the entire line is constantly tenuously maintained, it can be difficult follow a fully coherent run on a book to completion, much less plan and execute it. And perhaps the best you can hope for is that the collected volumes of a given creatorās run are all internally consistent and solid and numbered in a clear way, which is not always necessarily the caseā¦ The standard in manga (and at a company like Image Comics) being one creator or creative team (plus editors and assistants etc.) starting fresh at chapter and volume 1 and so on, I think is a big advantage in terms of planning and approachability (to say nothing of variety).
Speaking personally I always assumed growing up that as an adult I would have a bunch of subscriptions at a local comic store, but in the end Iāve ended up finding manga magazine subscriptions and regular walks to Kinokuniya a much more satisfying outlet for that kind of feeling, and my American comic reading is reduced mainly to just checking out graphic novels and trades from my local library (for a while recently my main move was to periodically use advanced search in the online category to search for e.g. āpublisher=Fantagraphicsā and sort by date acquired as a way to discover new things). But itās bittersweet to reflect on still.
At any rate thatās all just my rambling perspective as one mostly lapsed ć¢ć”ć³ć enthusiast though!
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Oh I had no idea, I assumed that you bought an issue that contained bits of a Spider Man story, and bits of an Iron Man story, and then some lighter Guardians of the Galaxy stuff etcā¦
You have an example of a modern BD magazine here for instance: Le Journal De Spirou NĀ°4467 : Editions Dupuis : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
You have various āchaptersā of more or less popular bandes dessinĆ©es, plus articles, games and whatnot.
Ah that makes sense.
I genuinely donāt get why that multiverse stuff is so popular. Those BD magazines usually would also feature in-jokes and references to other āIPā from the same editor, but it doesnāt usually go beyond that. Admittedly it would be very difficult to build a multiverse when the universe of the various individual series is so different from the rest. Itās easier to have Batman and Superman meet than Asterix and ValĆ©rianā¦
By the way this is neither here nor there but I just remembered that I tried reading an American comics a few years ago and I was driven insane by the randomly bolded words all over the place for no apparent reason.
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Sometimes they do good stuff with this to emphasise points but so often they overuse the shit out of it. The worst was when it infiltrated manga translation letterring for a long while. My Bloom into You copies are riddled with it.
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Thatās really neat, thanks! I in turn had no idea BD followed more of a manga magazine-ish model. The francophone comics industry has a lot that seems enviable or alluring from an American perspective too (and I donāt know much about it).
But yeah, alas - your assumed version sounds nice but itās more like you buy one issue of Amazing Spider-Man and get one portion of a Spider-Man story that might be confusing to read because it crosses over with that monthās Spectacular Spider-Man, or the over-arching event going on in Avengers etc. which you would have to buy separatelyā¦ a lot more room for an individual installment to disappoint than when itās just one feature among a dozen others for your money.
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Actually that justifies the multiverse model, since itās about selling more copies of other āfloppiesā, right? I only became familiar with the concept of a multiverse because of the Marvel movies and TV shows over the past ~15 years, but then I assume that it was already a thing in the paper format?
Since with BDs they always came compiled in magazines thereās no mercantile reason to force crossovers. Youād just frontload your Asterix, Spirou and other popular IP on the cover and then sneak in your less popular/newer artists in the back pages. And of course before the internet we werenāt as overloaded with ācontentā, so weād actually read those even if we didnāt always love them, and sometimes they grew on you.
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Come to think of it, I think it stems specifically from this single issue model. Itās just an easy way to encourage you to read multiple series, when otherwise thereād be nothing connecting the different series. If Spider-Man shows up in Fantastic Four for a story thatās in both series, then maybe you the Fantastic Four reader will buy Spider-Man that month too and get hooked. And that ballooned from the 80s and 90s on into the periodic mega-events where publishers promised world-shaking changes that you have to read a ton of series to fully understand.
Thereās some logic to it but itās a pity that it ended up being leaned on to such an exhausting extent and then that also somehow ended up defining not just superhero comics storytelling but superhero movie blockbusters too.
Ah ha! And you came to the same conclusion as I was writing this comment too 
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