#redicomi

I could talk about demographics for hours but I tried to keep the thread concise and just address the question. (A little more detail in this post). I'm going to compare Japan and the U.S. because that's what I'm most familiar with.

The tweet I replied to was this:

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First, some things I need to get off my chest that I'm tired of people arguing — and say it with me — demographics are very important. Beyond reaching your target audience, they create various platforms and spaces for a larger variety of titles to be published, including more marginalized voices. Erasing demographics would only hurt marginalized works, like shoujo manga, which would be the first to go. Male oriented media/perspectives would become the default since we live in a patriarchy amongst other things. Titles would become samey.

No, gendered demographics are not necessarily reductive, usually people’s ideas regarding gender are. Sure, society can be weird about it, but gender isn’t inherently bad or evil. You are not as progressive as you think you are if you believe erasing gendered demographics is a good idea. That’s honestly a Gender Studies 101 take.

Some people say they don’t care about demographics or don’t notice and just read “what’s good”. That’s great, but yes you do notice, if even on a subconscious level (I see people subconsciously avoid certain demographics all the time). This is not a brag, but I can tell the demographic of any manga just by looking at the cover or a few pages even if I know nothing about it. There are meaningful differences obvious to those with an eye for it. Again, not a brag, but it’s there.

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With that out of the way — there are various factors that go into why a publisher labels a manga a certain way (combination of art style, writing, etc). There’s also a difference between how publishers in Japan and abroad do things.

Shoujo/shounen/seinen categorization obviously is a Japanese thing. (Josei isn’t really used in Japan and is often grouped with shoujo, but that’s another convo right now). And these labels only apply to manga. They’re not used for manhwa, webtoons, or even light novel manga adaptions. Those are all different subgroups under the umbrella of comics. Calling a webtoon a shoujo is like calling The Walking Dead comics (a western comic series) a seinen. I’m not saying one is better than the other, they just have different categorization labels.

Even the LN manga adaption of The Apothecary Diaries, for example, is not shelved with the rest of the seinen manga. It is labeled a seinen on many ebook sites (more on them later) but there’s a separate LN manga adaption shelf. Why? I can tell when something is a LN adaption without being told because they do have different vibes and appeals, and thus different audiences. For sure there’s a Venn Diagram of manga, LN adaptions, and webtoon readers etc. but the Venn Diagram is not a circle.

In the U.S., there are different but sometimes similar labels used in publishing (young adult, for example) but it’s not a one-to-one. Overseas publishers probably have more leeway on how they market things because of this. It’s a different market from Japan, a market unfamiliar with JP demographics and magazines. EN publishers use imprints and this is meant to replace JP publishers using magazines (which the JP imprints on based on). In the U.S., bookstores arrange manga by alphabetical order, no regard for demographics or genre or anything. That was so weird to me the first time I saw it.

Normally EN manga have imprints and group series based on the "theme" of that imprint, but in Japan it's based on the magazine it's published in since each magazine has a “publishing house style” that is appealing to a specific taste for their readers. If you like one series from a certain magazine, it's likely you'll like another from the same magazine. They group the series based on these magazine imprints in stores.

Even EN novels are organized in categories, like genre, reader age, and/or gender, and then alphabetical order. In Japan, manga is organized by demographic (shounen, seinen, shoujo) > publisher > magazine/imprint > then alphabetical order.

You’ll have the shounen section, but Jump titles are labeled on the shelf, and Square Enix titles are grouped together, then arranged by alphabetical order. This goes for both new and used. Even when there’s a separate area for new releases, they tend to group them this way.

To the far left, there are signs that say “seinen comics”, and the publishers “Shueisha”, “Shogakukan”, and “Kodansha” in the back. New releases are usually end-caps. The blue sign says “New Release Comics”. They tend to keep the demos together for these too.

Selling bundles of used series is common, so you can see in these pictures, the one on the left has signs on the shelves that say “Kodansha seinen comics”. Right pic is my local bookoff. It’s not explicitly labeled, but they grouped all the shoujo bundles on the same shelf.

Left: “shoujo comics/ladies" comics” (Josei is often referred to as “ladies' comics” in Japan). “BL/ladies' comics”. Right: the shelves are labeled “Champion”, “Sunday”, “Magazine”, “Jump” which are all shounen magazines.

Colleen had asked me some questions regarding manga demographics for their video (my contribution starts around the 32:04 section, but watch the whole vid because it’s good!) The section I helped with was about how a U.S. publisher changed the demographic of a series they licensed... which is... not how that works. I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing with Renta JP in the vid was similar to physical bookstores too, because of it’s part of marketing their “brand”.

We stan Colleen🫡

Since the magazines are sold in Japan and not just the tankobon volumes, readers there are likely more familiar with what series are published together under what demographic and what makes them fall under that demographic. Plus you HAVE to know the demographic to even be in the right section of a bookstore when looking for a specific title.

If they switched up what a manga is labeled as in the bookstore versus the magazine, that would muddle things and confuse readers. I can imagine they’d want readers shopping for one title to see their other titles next to it so they buy it. It’s all a part of their brand. But since the magazines aren’t sold outside Japan and the market is different, foreign publishers take liberties. Sometimes I wonder if they should’ve even used JP demos tbh.

Then the same Twitter user asked a follow up that led to more relevant stuff that I hadn't initially mentioned in the thread:

I picked up the Japanese tankobon of Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu (The Summer Hikaru Died) from my local bookstore back when vol.1 first came out and it was in the seinen section, which makes sense for this series. Renta JP has it under “ladies' comics” (usually what they call josei, since josei is not commonly used there).

I’m not 100% if this is the reason or not, but one possibility is that BL and horror have a lot of history with shoujosei so they labeled it as such. And in brick and mortar shops, like I said, the publisher would want their titles together so people buy more of their stuff. But a very very very common thing is that online, ebooks don’t have a physical shelf they’re on so the way you’re searching for them is different. So they changed the label for online searches for what gets the most hits/clicks. (I have seen the label for Hikaru change multiple times over the years on Renta btw - they're fudging the label for the clicks).

Horimiya is labeled shoujo on Renta, but it is in fact a shounen. It’s not in the shoujo section at bookstores.

It's from a shounen magazine and feels very shounen because of multiple reasons (like art, story style, etc.)

Again, they are playing around with the labels to optimize marketing for digital ebook sites versus brick-and-mortar book stores.

I call this ✨demographic gerrymandering but for comics✨ LOL and there's a reason I used the word "gerrymandering" as it's basically the bullshitting of demographics and it's not a word that has a positive connotation. Ebook sites are often a mess and the bane of my existence, causing more confusion...

But yeah, I hope this was informative!

To wrap up, check out Colleen's video about how demographics matter, actually -

And my thread that has some clips from a livestream I did with Colleen where we explain magazines and demographics some more -