Immensely cool miniature manga.

Whenever we’re out and about and come across a bank of capsule toy machines, we always stop to check out what’s on offer. We usually expect to find some cool figures, but our most recent haul is actually a collection of manga.

New from Bandai is a collection of mini manga volumes, representing a number of popular series currently or recently serialized in publisher Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump.

Looking at how tiny they are, you might think that these are little decorative plastic replicas, or maybe come with straps to attach to your bag as an accessory or use as a keychain. But nope, these are honest-to-goodness manga volumes, just in very miniaturized form!

▼ A full-sized manga volume next to its counterpart from the Mamegashabon Weekly Shonen Jump Jump Comics Collection, as the capsule toy series is called. The mini version is about 5 centimeters (2 inches) in length, compared to the 16 centimeters of the original.

These kinds of tiny books are called mamehon (literally “bean books”) in Japan, and when you open up the cover, you’ll see the same artwork, text, and layout as you would in the full-scale version, as shown in our capsule version of the first volume of The Elusive Samurai.

For further authenticity, inside the capsule with each book is its corresponding dust jacket. These outer covers are attached to the product description paper that’s also inside the capsule, so you’ll need to cut it out and fold it onto the manga yourself, but once you do, the impression that you have a manga that’s been hit with a sci-fi shrinking ray is even more convincing.

The mini manga are priced at 500 yen (US$3.40), with a total of six series in the lineup. On our four tries, we came away with The Elusive Samurai, Mission: Yozakura Family, Undead Unluck, and Ichi the Witch…

…which means we’re still looking for My Hero Academia and Sakamoto Days.

As for the reading experience, it’s worth noting that while the chapters in each book are complete, the mini versions contain only three to four chapters each, less than the full-sized versions. Also, since the fonts and typesetting remain faithful to the original versions, sometimes the text can be kind of difficult to read, especially for complex kanji characters that pack a lot of strokes into a small amount of page space. However, with manga also being a visual storytelling medium, even if it’s tough to decipher a word or two here or there, we don’t think fans of these series will have any trouble following the plot and enjoying the artwork in these very cool special editions.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]