Shogakukan’s Shonen Sunday looked a little different last week.

Japanese publisher Shogakukan’s Weekly Shonen Sunday manga anthology magazine comes out, as you’d probably guess, once a week, though not on Sunday. The most recent issue, pictured above, hit store shelves on Wednesday, February 7, and soon after online comments started buzzing about how “malnourished” it was.

Curious to see for ourselves, we picked up a copy, plus one of the newest Weekly Shonen Jump, a rival anthology published by Shueisha.

▼ Left: Weekly Shonen Sunday
Right: Weekly Shonen Jump

Viewed from the front, there wasn’t much difference. Sure, Weekly Shonen Sunday’s cover is predominantly taken up by a photo of Nodoka Shizume, a member of idol singer unit ZOC, but the human cover girl of the week being the primary focus has been the norm for the majority of mainstream shonen and seinen manga magazines for some time. In order to see what had people calling this issue of Sunday “malnourished,” you’ve got to swing your perspective around and look at them from above.

Usually, Sunday and Jump are of comparable size to one another. For the most recent issue, though, Sunday is considerably thinner.

▼ Left: Weekly Shonen Jump
Right: Weekly Shonen Sunday

Just how much thinner? When we grabbed a ruler to check, we measured Jump at roughly three centimeters (1.2 inches) thick…

…while Sunday was only about 2.2 centimeters.

Leafing through the pages of Sunday, it quickly became clear why this issue is so much smaller than normal. With rare exceptions like a double issue at New Year’s, the weekly manga anthologies in Japan don’t take publishing breaks during the year, and so neither do the artists of the series they serialize. However, even the most imaginative and industrious manga creators need a few days off now and again, and when that happens, no new chapter for their series appears in that issue.

For the February 7 issue of Sunday, five series, an unusually high number are on hiatus at the same time: Detective Conan (from artist Gosho Aoyama), Mao (Rumiko Takahashi), Major 2nd (Takuya Mitsuda), Shibuya Near Family (Koji Kumeta), and Tokachi Hitoribocchi Noen (Yuji Yokoyama). When an anthology issue is short on regularly serialized series, the publisher will sometimes put in one-shot/single-chapter manga from guest artists, but that didn’t happen for this Sunday issue, with a chapter from Boku ga Shinu dake no Hyakumonogatari, usually exclusive to Shogakukan’s Sunday Webry online manga service, as the sole substitute.

Just to be thorough (and also to take advantage of having our boss pay for our manga out of the company expense account), we also picked up the latest copy of publisher Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine, seen on the right in this photo.

Magazine usually isn’t as big as Jump or Sunday, but this time around it came in at 2.5 centimeters in thickness, making this issue of Sunday the thinnest of the three.

▼ Left: Weekly Shonen Sunday
Right: Weekly Shonen Magazine

▼ Left to right: Sunday, Magazine, and Jump

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that even in this “malnourished” form, Weekly Shonen Sunday is still huge to an extent far beyond what you’d find in a comic anthology in other countries. It’s also something that you can buy at pretty much any corner convenience store or train station newsstand in Japan, as tracking down physical comic media doesn’t require you to make a trip to an out of the way specialty store. Printed-on-paper manga is easily and abundantly available in Japan.

But at what price, you might be wondering? Our Japan-born-and-raised reporter Ahiruneko, who we sent on the shopping run, hadn’t bought all three of these anthologies at once in a while, and when he saw how much they cost, he was surprised. Specifically, he made sure to tell us he couldn’t believe how much of a price difference there was, because both Sunday and Magazine cost…

…360 yen (US$2.45), while Jump is just 290 yen (US$1.97).

When 360 yen feels like a lot for a 2.2-centimeter mass of manga, you know that physical media-fan otaku still have it really good in Japan.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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