My stated intention for writing the Magazine no Mori column is to introduce the western audience to the vast, complex mass of manga magazines that are published in Japan. Where we have Shonen Jump only, a visit to a major Japanese anime/manga store will paralyze a western fan with the sheer number of magazines to choose from. But once you get past the number of magazines, what really impresses is the variety. And that variety is what I hope you can see when you look at my column. Action, romance for guys and girls, comics for children, for adult men and women and some interesting, creepy, creative and weird stuff around the edges. Which brings us this month to Gentosha Publishing’s Monthly Comic Birz (月刊コミックバーズ) magazine.
Birz‘s major claim to fame here in the west is as the official home of Hidekaz Himaruya’s Hetalia – Axis Powers. And it totally fits the “island of misfit manga” feel that the magazine has always cultivated. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that gothic horror Red Garden manga (illustrated magnificently by Kirihito Ayamura and written by Gonzo) has run in this magazine – it was worth reading for the clothes alone, as was Peach-Pit’s Rozen Maiden. Just about the time I came across the manga for Penguindrum (illustrated by Hoshino Lilly, written by Ikuhara Kunihiko as Ikunichowder) and Yurikuma Arashi (illustrated by Morishima Akiko and written by Ikuhara as Ikunigomakinako) which are running simultaneously right now, I suddenly realized that Birz series are probably better known in America as anime than as the manga that run in the magazine. Also interestingly, Comic Birz is the home to the most recent series by popular creator Kia Asamiya, Kanojo no Carrera, in which he is able to draw sexy adult women and sports cars to his heart’s content.
The website for Comic Birz has sample chapters for all the currently running stories, upcoming releases, an editor’s blog, and links to various other Gentosha magazines. The magazine costs 650 yen/issue ($5.47 at time of writing) for about 650 pages.
Comic Birz has, for at least the last decade, cultivated a sense of the weird, with one foot firmly in the Horror genre, as you can see by the cover illustrating this review. Birz comics are sometimes disturbing, often outrageous, occasionally violent and almost always unrepentant, which is what I especially like about it. They’ve also just invested themselves heavily in Yuri manga, which I know means we’ll get stuff that makes me cringe, but it’s also more likely to have murder and mayhem than blushing confessions. Phew.
Monthly Comic Birz from Gentosha Publishing: http://www.gentosha-comics.net/birz/
It’s the beginning of a new year and we’re all feeling energetic and stuff, right? I can’t think of a better time to tackle Manga Action (漫画アクション) magazine from Futabasha. Manga Action is another one of the manly manga magazines that fills convenience store racks on Japanese street corners.
In previous posts, we’ve discussed two of the best-known Shoujo manga magazines, 
So, we’ve talked many times about the vague lines that differentiate shounen/seinen and shoujo/josei. In real life, there is no one age when all boys shift from caring about becoming ninjas to liking looking at girls in bikinis and there is no one moment when girls stop wanting to be a princess and suddenly start paying attention to the cute boy in class.
One of the tropiest tropes about manga culture in Japan is the old chestnut about salarymen reading manga on the train while commuting. While I have seen this only rarely in my times in Tokyo, it is still quite true that salarymen read manga. Just not so much on trains. You can find them after work hours, avoiding going home, clustered in front of the manga magazine racks in just about any convenience store. If they are reading manga (as opposed to just plain old men’s magazines) the magazines you are likely to see them reading are not the oversize phonebook-like magazines like 
