The bad boy of manga is back. Five-year-old Shin, the star of Yoshito Usui’s manga Crayon Shinchan, is a mischievous imp who makes Dennis the Menace look benign by comparison: Shin uses his mother’s lipstick for body art, peeks up her skirt in public and break-dances on the kitchen table. He also has a rather premature interest in girlie magazines and Jessica Alba.
CMX released the first volume of Crayon Shinchan earlier this year and plans to issue a new volume of the long-running series every two months. It recently put a preview of the first volume up on MySpace.
This is the second time around in print in the U.S. for Shin and his harried parents; the now-defunct manga publisher, Comics One, published 10 volumes of the manga between 2002 and 2004.
Asako Suzuki, CMX’s director of manga, said the key reason for Shin’s return is the release of the Crayon Shinchan anime by Funimation. “The publisher in Japan and the TV stations, which happen to be the licensor for the anime, wanted to have synergy in the U.S. with Shinchan,” she said. “We have a great relationship with Funimation.”
The anime is currently available as streaming video on the Adult Swim Web site, and Funimation plans to release a Crayon Shinchan DVD on May 13. CMX editor Jim Chadwick said CMX hopes to do some cross-promotion with the DVD when it is released.
At about 120 pages for $7.99, each volume of Crayon Shinchan is shorter and less expensive than most other manga. Suzuki said that this allows the manga to stay faithful to the Japanese version. CMX has the same page numbering as the original, although the trim size is smaller to cut costs and fit the standard CMX format.
The smaller size is also a better fit for the material, Chadwick said, because each three-page chapter is a self-contained story. “It’s a series that is much better read in small doses,” he said. “It’s almost like sketch comedy.”
Unlike the earlier edition, the CMX version is unflipped and will follow the right-to-left reading sequence of the original Japanese language comics. CMX is also doing a new translation that attempts to capture the puns and wordplay of the original without localizing it too much.
Although Crayon Shinchan’s crude style and colorful covers suggest childish fun, the manga is rated M because the humor relies heavily on nudity, sexual innuendo and bodily functions. CMX is marketing the book to both chain bookstores and comics shops, but Chadwick said this title has elicited more interest than usual from the comics shop market. “They know what the property is—they have seen it on TV,” he said, “and those channels are more used to dealing with mature comics material anyway.”
Chadwick also said that the CMX manga is more faithful to the Japanese original than Funimation’s version of the anime. “[Funimation] has been able to pick and choose which episodes to use, out of the whole body of Shinchans,” he explained, “they are not really running them chronologically and they do a fairly significant rewrite on them.” With a smaller team, CMX didn’t have that luxury. “We couldn’t sit down and do all the logistical mapping they do in the cartoon,” he said. “We have to follow the internal logic.”
One small but telling example is Shin’s favorite anime, Action Mask, which Funimation translated as “Action Bastard.” The word “bastard” wasn’t a problem, Chadwick said, since the manga has a mature rating anyway, but it struck a wrong note. “In the manga, Shin is the only one doing bad things,” he explained. “In that world, there wouldn’t be a show with a ‘bad’ name. I feel the manga is a little bit more innocent than the anime in tone and style. There is an innocent, simple quality to it all.”
