Ikki

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Ikki ( Jap.月刊IKKI Gekkan Ikki ) was a Japanese manga magazine that the Shogakukan Publishing House published from 2000 to 2014. The alternative short stories and individual chapters of several longer manga series that appeared in the magazine were aimed primarily at male students and were therefore part of his genre.

Release history and conception

The first issue of Ikki was published in November 2000. Since the magazine was initially an additional magazine to the Big Comic Spirits published by the same publisher, it was called Spirits Zōkan Ikki (ス ピ リ ッ ツ 増 刊 IKKI). The magazine then brought out the Shogakukan publishing house every other month until the concept of the magazine was changed with the April 2003 issue. Hideki Egami (江 上 英 樹, Egami Hideki ), who was already primarily responsible for the Big Comic Spirits , became the new editor-in-chief of the magazine, which has appeared on the 25th of each month since then. Egami wanted to offer illustrators with great creative potential - he himself named Taiyō Matsumoto as an example - a suitable platform for publication, because these same illustrators would often gamble away their potential in the reader-oriented competitive pressure of the weekly his magazines such as Big Comic Spirits .

At the same time, they wanted to encourage young comic artists and for this purpose introduced the Ikiman Young Talent Award , which has been awarded in every second edition since the May 2003 edition. Hisae Iwaoka and Shigeyuki Fukumitsu , among others, were winners of the Ikiman competition.

Since the magazine gave the artists a lot of freedom in the design of their works, the range of the magazine was very wide. There were science fiction stories as well as autobiographical and love stories. According to Hideki Egami, the main focus was on the individuality of each manga artist.

In May 2009 the American publisher Viz Media published a website in cooperation with Ikki , on which chapters of several manga from the magazine will be published in English translation for American Internet users in the coming years. The titles were then also published in book form.

The magazine was discontinued in 2014. The last issue was published on September 25, 2014. In March 2015, the publisher launched Hibana, a new monthly magazine that was to serve as a replacement for Ikki's target group . Three series of the discontinued magazine were continued in the new magazine (including Dorohedoro ). Other series were completed in previous issues before the magazine was discontinued, or continued directly in book form. Taiyō Matsumoto's Sunny was subsequently featured in Gekkan magazine ! Spirits .

Range

Ikki was considered an offshoot of the Big Comic Spirits magazine, a his magazine, so it was originally aimed primarily at adult men. The majority of the readership was also made up of men, especially readers in their twenties, mostly students. However, the magazine broke with the typical gender concepts of Japanese manga magazines and increasingly aimed at a female readership. At 40 percent, the magazine had a relatively high proportion of female readers for a Seinen magazine and some of the artists who worked for Ikki , including Natsume Ono , George Asakura , est em and Sakumi Yoshino , were previously in Boys Love , Shōjo - or Josei area, so previously had primarily a female readership as a target group.

Since Ikki mainly focused on manga off the mainstream, the magazine's circulation was relatively small compared to other Japanese manga magazines. The number of readers fell steadily: in 2004 an issue of the magazine sold around 34,000 copies in 2004, and in 2005 around 29,000 copies. In 2006 the sales of an issue fell to 18,500 and by 2008 to around 15,000. Some of the magazine's manga series have been made into anime television series (including Tetsuko no Tabi and Rideback ) and some have been translated into other languages.

Published Manga (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Interview with Hideki Egami ( Memento from June 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Monthly Ikki Magazine Suspends Publication. In: Anime News Network. July 19, 2014, accessed March 16, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Inio Asano, Kumiko Suekane, More to Start New Manga in Hibana Magazine. In: Anime News Network. Retrieved March 16, 2016 .
  4. ^ Monthly Ikki Magazine's Individual Series' Plans Announced. In: Anime News Network. Retrieved March 16, 2016 .
  5. ^ Editions of Japanese manga magazines 2004 and 2005 ( Memento from May 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ J-Magazine.or.jp ( Memento from July 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive )