Showing No Mercy for 35 Years! Monthly Shonen Gangan's Original [United] Era Part 2 (1997-2001)

Upon the very creation & launch of Monthly Shonen Gangan the direction & image of the magazine itself wasn't exactly what people seemed to assume it would be. Since it was published by Enix it was apparently first thought of as a manga magazine based around video games & fantasy, because Dragon Quest was Enix's biggest IP.  In reality, though, aside from the two Dragon Quest manga that did run in the magazine upon its debut (Emblem of Roto & the four-panel gag strips) it was really more or less the same kind of general manga magazine aimed at boys, similar to Shonen Jump, Shonen Magazine, or Shonen Sunday. Yoshihiro Hosaka, Gangan's first Editor-in-Chief, even stated that as his goal for Shonen Gangan back in late 1991, and come 1996 Hosaka still felt that way, though in reality the magazine had already started becoming something else. Namely, Shonen Gangan wound up finding a more consistently older audience than its fellow shonen manga magazines, while the kinds of manga that ran were generally seen as being more of a fusion of shonen & shojo manga, with some even calling it "Gangan Kei" or "Enix Kei" to emphasize the magazine's unique feel.

However, come 1997 a shift would happen over at Shonen Gangan, one that went completely against what Hosaka had stated in interviews just a year prior. Now Gangan was going to go more in with "game-like" manga being serialized, as well as more direct video game adaptations, despite Hosaka stating that he had no intention of doing such a thing; of the 14 manga covered in this part five are game adaptations, three of which are Dragon Quest-related. This shift in focus looks to be what would eventually lead to a mass exodus of talent in the latter half of 2001... but, for now, we're still in what could be called a "united" era of Monthly Shonen Gangan, so let's see what notable manga debuted in the magazine right up until that very exodus was about the happen.

We start by jumping nearly an entire year ahead from Toki no Daichi's debut in early 1996, with the only stuff of minor note from that time being Mine Yoshizaki's Guardian Eight, a pre-Sgt. Frog series that has mostly been forgotten with time, & a short-lived Pokémon gag manga (which, again, emphasized Gangan's shift over to featuring more game-based manga). Instead, we start with Issue #4 of 1997, which saw the serialized debut of Renjuro Kindaichi... who was literally only 17 years old at the time & still in high school. The reason why Kindachi managed to find herself a serialization in Shonen Gangan as such a young age was due to a one-shot she submitted in 1996 that became the runner-up at the 3rd Enix 21st Century Manga Award, which she then expanded on for her serialized debut, Jungle wa Itsumo Hare nochi Guu/The Jungle Was Always Sunny, Then Came Guu, better known abroad as simply Haré+Guu. The manga told the tale of Haré, a young boy who lives with his widowed mother Weda in the jungle until, one day, Weda welcomes a young girl named Guu into their household. In reality, though, Guu is a highly sarcastic liminal being that's beyond true comprehension & is capable of all manner of things, from swallowing people whole (she even has a Japanese couple who essentially just live in her stomach) to causing natural disasters. Luckily for most, Guu simply just likes hanging out with Haré... and while Haré himself eventually comes to truly befriend Guu it's not as though his life will ever remain anything but simple after meeting Guu. Yeah, as you can tell from that concept, Haré+Guu was a surreal comedy manga that generally saw Guu creating some sort of havoc in Haré's life, though there were also story arcs involving things like Weda's relationship with a man named Clive who lives in the city, Weda becoming pregnant with a new child, Haré finding love in a girl named Rita, & all manner of various hijinks & insanity, including time travel shenanigans. Upon reaching 100 chapters (across 10 volumes) in the January 2003 issue of Shonen Gangan Haré+Guu technically ended... only for it to continue on in the very next issue under the new name HaréGuu (again, the OG Japanese title was much longer, but the change still makes a fittingly weird sort of sense with the simplified international title), and we'll get into that series next time.

While the Haré+Guu manga has yet to see official English release, there was a 2001 TV anime adaptation that actually did see release in North America via AN Entertainment (the short-lived licensing division of now-defunct anime retailer Anime Nation), which released the entire 26-episode TV series & the first OVA series (Haré+Guu Deluxe) via dual-audio DVD singles throughout 2006 & 2007; unfortunately, AN Entertainment never managed to release the other OVA series (Haré+Guu Final) in English.

Showing No Mercy for 35 Years! Monthly Shonen Gangan's Original [United] Era Part 1 (1991-1996)

Originally founded by Yasuhiro Fukushima as a real-estate tabloid publisher called Eidansha Boshu Service Center on September 22, 1975, the company would eventually get renamed to Enix (a portmanteau of ENIAC & phoenix) on August 30, 1982 & shift over to video games, which was a burgeoning market at the time. Enix made an early name for itself via its Enix Game Hobby Program Contest, where people could submit game prototypes & the winners being published as full games, and it was through this that Enix found talent like Yuji Horii, Koichi Nakamura, & Kazuro Morita, which in turn eventually led to the creation of games like The Portopia Serial Murder Case, Door Door, & Morita's Shogi, respectively, which were all early hits for Enix. However, Enix would truly hit pay dirt with 1986's Dragon Quest, which was co-designed by Horii & Nakamura, while Horii used his connections with Kazuhiko Torishima (an editor for Weekly Shonen Jump he had befriended back when he was a freelance writer) to have Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama do the character designs for the game; combine all of that with music by the venerable (& later controversial) Koichi Sugiyama & you have a hit. By the end of the 80s Enix was a major game publisher/developer, but it wanted to be more than that... so the company decided to re-enter the world it initially got its start in: Book Publishing.

At first Enix started simple by publishing books about Dragon Quest, most notably strategy guides, while also continuing its relationship with Shueisha to launch Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai in late 1989, which was an original series by Riku Sanjo (story) & Koji Inada (art), with Yuji Horii supervising it. However, Enix knew that for it to truly succeed in book publishing it needed to have a manga magazine of its own, & while it did initially publish a series of four-panel manga based on Dragon Quest in 1990 (that'd later become its own, multi-game series of works), it was on March 12, 1991 that Enix truly got into the manga business with the release of the very first (April) issue of Monthly Shonen Gangan; the magazine would always release on the 12th of every month. The name of the magazine was said to be a reference to the command "Gangan Ikouze" first seen in 1990's Dragon Quest IV, which has your party automatically use their most powerful abilities on the enemy, regardless of MP cost; eventually the command would be localized into English as "Show No Mercy!". Over the course of the next 35 years Monthly Shonen Gangan would become a home for a variety of manga, some of which have gone on to become iconic works, others simply the starting points for mangaka who'd become more well known later on, & even a number of manga that were based on various pre-existing IP, whether that be anime, video games, & whatnot.

The history of Shonen Gangan, however, also has its own ups & downs, as a major exodus from within Enix's publishing division in 2001 would result in the creation of rival publishers & magazines, the size of Monthly Gangan itself would notoriously exceed over 1,000 pages at points (with Enix even jokingly advertising not to drop an issue on someone), Enix would later merge with Square to form Square-Enix, and it's a history that admittedly isn't as well known in English, especially when compared to the likes of its most well known rivals, i.e. Jump, Magazine, Sunday, or even Champion. So, to celebrate the 35th Anniversary of Monthly Shonen Gangan's debut, I'm dusting off the ol' Ages of Jump format as we go over the history of Shonen Gangan by way of what (I can tell) look to be its most iconic/notable manga. This will be a six-part series comprised of three "eras" that I've (admittedly) determined primarily based on the life of arguably Gangan's most iconic manga around the world, but it still results in a roughly even spread where each "era" takes up ~10-11 years, as this series technically will only cover up to 2022.

So, without further ado, it's time for us to "Show No Mercy" as we start with the first half of Monthly Shonen Gangan's "Original [United] Era". Gangan Ikouze!

Masami Kurumada One-Shot Manga Clean Up: Mikeneko Rock, S't X, & Sei'ya ni Kane wa Naru

In 2024 I celebrated the 50th Anniversary of Masami Kurumada's debut as as mangaka by using the whole year to make my way through all of the major gaps I had left when it came to reviewing Kurumada's catalog of works, & in March of 2025 I finally cleared out reviewing all of his long-running works when I covered Saint Seiya: Next Dimension. At that point I had done write-ups for literally all of Kurumada's long-running manga, all of his standalone short-run manga, & the vast majority of his one-shots (plus a couple of spin-off manga done by other people), but that still left some small gaps remaining. Easily the biggest one would be the last bits & pieces of Saint Seiya one-offs & short run side stories that Kurumada has made (namely 2004's Tenkai-hen ~Overture~ introduction, 2018's Episode Zero, 2019's Origin, & 2020's Destiny), and eventually I'll cover those all together in a single piece; I'll figure out how I'll cover the rest of Saint Seiya Then once Kurumada is truly done with it. There is also 2022-2025's Fuma no Kojirou Gaiden: Asuka Mumyocho (which Kurumada finally finished last year) & even 2017's Ai no Jidai BEGIN (a collection of his pre-1974 amateur one-shots which recently got fan translated), both of which I'll certainly get to sometime later this year.

However, that still leaves two isolated one-shots remaining, and they happen to be Masami Kurumada's first ever professionally published one-shot manga & his latest one (as of this piece, at least). Therefore, seeing as I no longer wish to do individual reviews of one-shots, like I did way back in 2012 & 2013 for Mabudachi Jingi & Shiro-Obi Taisho, let me combine these two unrelated stragglers together into what I generally call a "Special Feature" here on the blog, and while I'm at it I'll also toss in a bonus one-shot parody of one of Kurumada's works by someone else that was actually published alongside said work as it was in serialization.

Since I tend to go in chronological order when it comes to stuff like this, that means we begin with the first manga one-shot Masami Kurumada ever did as a professional mangaka (or "mangaya", as he'd call himself at the time), 1975's Mikeneko Rock, with "mikeneko" purposefully written a bit vaguely in Japanese ("みけ猫") so that it doesn't automatically translate to "Calico Cat", which is "三毛猫" in Japanese; as you can see, the fan translation goes with "Stray Cat". This 30-page one-shot appeared in the December 1975 issue of Monthly Shonen Jump, not long after the (true & final) cancellation of Sukeban Arashi that same year, and it would then get included at the end of Volume 2 of that manga in 1977 as a bonus; Wikipedia Japan says it was first published in 1976, but that's 100% incorrect. Mikeneko Rock looks to stay true to the style of Sukeban Arashi, as it starred a female delinquent with a penchant for getting into fights, a la Rei Kojinyama, so let's see if Kurumada learned some good lessons following Sukeban Arashi's cancellation, though still prior to the debut of Ring ni Kakero.