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Comic BonBon Ends in 2007, Shōnen Rival Starts April
posted on by Egan Loo
The Japanese publisher Kodansha announced that it is suspending publication of Comic BonBon, its monthly manga magazine aimed at elementary schoolchildren, due to declining readership this year. The December issue (on sale November 15) will be its last issue. Kodansha will start Monthly Shōnen Rival, a new manga magazine aimed at junior high schoolers, next spring. Getbackers artist Rando Ayamine's June 27 blog entry indicated that he will serialize in a new Kodansha magazine in April.
Comic BonBon began publication in November of 1981 with a focus on the Mobile Suit Gundam robot war series. Specifically, it helped expand the "Gundam Boom" by running a manga about competing young plastic model builders called PlaMo Kyōshirō, as well as Super Deformed Gundam and the samurai-influenced Musha Gundam. Like its competitor CoroCoro Comic from Shogakukan, BonBon was known for serializing many media tie-ins aimed at children such as Rockman (Megaman), and Medarot (Medabots).
Comic BonBon once outsold CoroCoro Comic with 750,000 copies of the April 1991 issue, but the two magazines swapped positions during Shogakukan's Pokémon boom. BonBon sold 98,000 copies a month in 2006 (when it cut its page count by half), compared to CoroCoro Comic's 963,334 copies. More recently, it has fallen in the range of 50,000 copies.
Source: Mainichi's Mantan Web, Ultimatum
Image © 2007 Kodansha Ltd. Publishers
