• The eagerly awaited

    Kaiju n ° 8

    by Naoya Matsumoto is released this Wednesday in bookstores, a shônen with a half-human being half-kaiju as a hero, these giant Japanese monsters

  • The publisher Kazé Manga relies heavily on this title, already a success in Japan, with an initial print run of 250,000 copies and a “maousse” promotional campaign.

  • The manga is experiencing a new golden age in France, with sales doubling between 2020 and 2021

As a symbol, the manga 

Kaiju n ° 8

, named after the giant Japanese monsters à la Godzilla, arrives this Wednesday in bookstores to “break” everything, with, as

LivresHebdo

reminds

us

, an exceptional print run of 250,000 copies for its first volume, and as much for the second to be published on December 8. Never seen.

It must be said that this release comes in a particular context.

From the first quarter of 2021, the seers began to panic and announced a record year for the manga, carried by the giants of the shônen (

One Piece

,

Demon Slayer

,

Jujutsu Kaisen

) and boosted by the animated adaptations (

My Hero Academia

,

L 'Attack on Titan

).

GFK sales figures fell at the end of September, and from January to August, the French bought 212 million books (+ 28% compared to 2020), including 51 million comics (+ 75% compared to 2020 ).

And among these comics, 29 million are manga.

It's huge.

Twice as many as in 2020.

A new golden age of manga shônen

Enough to boost the optimism of French publishers. Started in the summer of 2020 in Japan on Shônen Jump +, the digital platform of the famous publisher Shueisha and variation of his magazine

Weekly Shônen Jump

,

Kaiju n ° 8

quickly found its audience and in June already had three million copies sold. . Very quickly too, rumors circulated who in France was going to acquire this new shônen bomb and at what price. Kazé Manga, with titles like

Chainsaw Man

,

Black Cover

or recently

Mashle

, won the auction, and is planning a “maousse” launch with poster campaign, TV and cinema spots, and even a Parisian operation the size of a kaiju.

Since the

Demon Slayer

phenomenon

, and now with

Jujutsu Kaisen

or

Tokyo Revengers

, there is a kind of speculation on the new golden age of manga, and more precisely of shônen, and even on who will succeed, one day, perhaps, to

One Piece

.

But we should not forget the manga themselves.

If

Kaiju n ° 8

makes so much talk, and pleases the fans as much, it is because it summons both

old school

and new generation

shônen

, with its originality, its identity, here the kaijus.

Not a revolution but a blockbuster of the genre

These giant monsters are part of the daily life of the Japanese, to the point that there are, a bit like in

Pacific Rim

, Defense Forces responsible for fighting them. Kafka Hibino has always dreamed of being a part of it, but after failing the entrance exam many times, he is reduced to cleaning the streets after their passage and getting rid of their corpses. One day, a strange creature enters his body and metamorphoses it into a half-human, half-kaiju being.

Yuji swallows a relic and is possessed in

Jujutsu Kaisen

, Nezuko turns into a monster in

Demon Slayer

, Eren becomes a Titan in

Attack on Titan

… The mangaka Naoya Matsumoto does not revolutionize the genre, but masters the codes, and finds the balance between action, humor and even a beginning of reflection on the lost humanity of his character, which make

Kaiju n ° 8

a blockbuster of size.

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