Manga magazines are a fascinating aspect of the manga industry that I think, excluding the particularly popular ones such as Weekly Shonen Jump, are underappreciated in the West. I’ve heard people compare reading a manga magazine to watching a TV channel as you might come for only a few series but you may end up experiencing some that you didn’t know about and may like. While not a perfect analogy, I do understand the basic point it makes and it actually works well for the topic of today’s article as, similarly to how a TV show can occasionally change which channel it’s airing on, manga can also end up being released in a different magazine than it started in. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the reasons why manga may switch magazines.
The first reason and, seemingly, most common reason for a manga to change magazines is that the magazine it’s running in has been shutdown but the publisher doesn’t want to cancel the series itself. The first time I noticed this was when Monthly Shonen Jump, a sister magazine to Weekly Shonen Jump, was ended and it was announced that Claymore would temporarily run in Weekly Shonen Jump. A few months later, Shueisha released a new monthly shonen magazine, Jump Square, and Claymore was transferred there where it eventually finished its run. Of course, this only happens to the particularly popular series and the other series that run in the defunct magazine are likely to be cancelled instead.