Tag: Binbougami ga!

Binbougami ga!: Almost a Shojo Manga

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OK. That title is certainly a bit exaggerated. You would have to search for quite a bit to find a shojo manga were the main character’s nick name is Tit-chiko (maybe some odd title in Betsucomi). In the end Binbougami ga! is very firmly a boy’s manga with a distinct appeal to dudes. It is in Jump Square for heaven’s sake. It is hard to get more shonen than that.

But the reason I bring this up in the first place is that unlike a lot of shonen titles with a little tweaking you could actually convert the whole Binbougami ga! premise into a popular girls manga.  There is pretty much no way you could remake To Love-Ru as a girl’s manga without some colossal reworking of the manga’s base formula. In fact I might be a little be afraid of any manga magus that could attempt such a feat. On the hand without really changing any of the core principles of the manga (that is not Sakura’s bodacious boom boom body) there is a decent shojo manga premise at the core of Binbougami ga!

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Manga of the Month: Binbogami ga!

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Binbogami ga! (貧乏神が!) by Yoshiaki Sukeno

Some manga genres are safer than others. Shonen fighting manga don’t always sell gangbusters but they are usually a fairly safe bet. They are the blue chips stocks of manga. Josei manga on the other hand have yet to have anything close to a major success story. Josei has had several critical successes but nothing that sets the world on fire in English in terms of sales. But there is one category of manga that neither get critical praise nor major sales numbers. That is comedy manga. Even titles that you think would sell great due to animated popularity like Azumanga Daioh don’t particularly sell well.

And so American manga companies always seem very reluctant to pick up anything comedy related unless it has a stronger hook that moves it into another category where it might do well. There are a few exceptions to this rule but manga companies tend live by the motto of “once burned, twice shy.” So while I love Binbogami ga! I don’t think it is going to get picked up by Viz anytime soon. Which is a shame because it is a great series.

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From Rags to Riches, From Pilot to Series

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The first chapter of any manga we see rarely anything close to the preliminary draft of the same manga concept. You usually only get one chance to make a first impression so manga artists and their editors tweak, refine, trim their initial ideas that start rather rough around the edges until they are lean, mean, long-term series generating machines. The rougher drafts of existing work are often lost to the sea of time and then mostly only mentioned off handily in interviews. But on occasion we get to see behind the curtain when one-shots are published either to test the waters on a series or as a special treat for an existing series (or to fill some space in a tankobon).

There are three published version of Romance Dawn which eventually we go on to be the series we know as One Piece today. While the overall premise is instantly recognizable you can see the slow evolution of the concepts that would eventually become the finished product that is one of the best-selling comics ever. While Luffy and his pirate adventures are a constant not much else is. Main elements of the world are changed or dropped as the series is refined. Elements like witchcarft are removed and the quest for title of King of the Pirates is added. Almost all the chapters have a Nami like character who is absent in the final first chapter and introduced later on in the series. The progression from the initial idea to the polished work is quite intriguing even when we don’t see all the steps involved.

You can see a similar pattern when looking at the initial one-shot release of manga. Often times a popular one-shot manga will be spun off into a full series if the audience is receptive to the idea. That is often the reason to publish many one-shot manga in the first place. This phenomenon is often a good way to see the formative process of an initial concept to a finished product in an in-between stage. Even stories like Rumiko Takahashi’s Those Self Selfish Aliens or Fire Tripper give interesting insights into the full works that would become Urusei Yatsura and Inuyasha. In this post I will be examining two manga and how they evolve from their initial one-shot premiere to their final initial debut as a full-fledged story.

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