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Manga publishers are actively looking for their next big star creators, and several major publishers are currently doing global contests to find them, even outside of Japan. Shueisha is one of the largest manga publishers in the world, running the Shonen Jump brand and co-owning VIZ Media here in the United States. It has a very active account on X (formerly known as Twitter) under the name Jump Manga Award, with its Shonen Jump editors anonymously answering questions from aspiring manga creators as a means to build awareness for its various submission contests. It's an active community, and back in February, a question about creating manga brought out a surprisingly blunt response from these anonymous Shonen Jump editors.

It started with a simple question, asking 'What does it truly mean to face your audience?' The term 'face your audience' is a common phrase in manga, and particularly in critiques of manga submission portfolios by Shonen Jump editors.

"We believe the difference lies in whether the author is drawing ‘simply’ for their own self-indulgence, or with the intention of entertaining the readers burned into their minds," reads the anonymous response from a Shonen Jump editor. "You could say it’s like being obsessed with 'being unpredictable’ while completely making light of 'not disappointing your readers.'"

That being said, the anonymous Shonen Jump editor is aware (and warns!) that being too "reader-oriented" is pandering, and could lead to the author not imbuing their stories with what makes it unique to the manga creator.

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"However, if that self-indulgence goes out of control, with an overbearing ‘Just you watch!’ mentality – a twist that’s never been done before and surprises the readers (in a negative way), sadly boils down to your work not being on the same page as the audience," the Shonen Jump anonymous editor continues. "The ideal is to overcome both the readers’ predictions and expectations, but from the perspective of manga being a commercial work, we get the impression that ‘If you’re going to betray readers’ expectations, at least don’t be unpredictable’ is something you hear very often. But this is only a personal opinion, and other people may have a different understanding of this.”

Who that person is to have that personal opinion is not known, but it's endorsed by Shueisha and Shonen Jump enough to circulate it on one of their official platforms.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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