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twinstarburst · 3 days ago

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obsessed with characters who were written for one another. like, what do you mean the reason for my existence is to be by your side? what do you mean our divine purpose is to belong to one another, for better or worse?

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twinstarburst · 3 days ago

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Hope you’re well. Do you know how much extra content volumes usually have compared to the number of weekly pages? Apparently we’re getting 60 extra pages. Is that a lot more than normal?

Hello! Thanks for the well wishes.

You've come to the right person, because I'm a weirdo who has done a ridiculous amount of research on Shueisha's tankōban releases and how they differ from WSJ serialization, so I have a good idea about how some of those pages are going to be used. I'm also gonna compare what we know about this final volume to those of other series.

Strap in for the spreadsheets and data party, pal!

First, here's a look at a selection of MHA volumes.

As you can see, roughly 20 pages is typical. 58 seems wild in comparison. I wanted to know what those 20 pages were usually used for.

So, I went through my copy of volume 37 and did a breakdown of its contents.

Now lemme explain some things:

Every tankōban will have between 4-6 pages for legal disclaimers ("this is a work of fiction", etc.), table of contents, and copyright information.

A "door" is a printing term for what one might call the volume title page or chapter title page (example in link). Not all chapters have "doors," most have their titles integrated into the first page, like so:

The vast majority of tankōban have page counts that are divisible by four. This is related to the physical mechanics of printing and binding books, so it is unusual to find ones outside this format. Volume 11 is an outlier in this regard with 210 pages; in fact, the English language release cut those two surplus pages.

Tankōban may have dust jackets. MHA tankōban with dust jackets often have a second, internal "sketch cover" and a final page promoting the next volume. These are not included in page counts, and are thus not included in my breakdown.

Manga is of course read right-to-left; this means if you hold a tankōban open, odd-numbered pages will be on the left side and even-numbered pages will be on the right.

In professional publishing, chapters are structured so their first page of actual story content is on the left. Page planning, which is taught to new artists and enforced by editors, involves the odd-numbered page ending on some sort of "pull." Basically, page 2 might be drawn to lead your eye across the book, but page 3 has to make you want to turn the page and find out what happens next.

Basically everything published in Weekly Shonen Jump has chapters with an odd-number of pages, so it'll have 15, 17, 19, or 21 pages, instead of 16, 18, 20, or 22. This allows the chapter to both begin and end on the lefthand side; even-numbered pages before and after the chapters separate the different series with promotional ads.

What we think of as bonus material is mostly what I personally call adjustment pages: in order for every chapter to still begin and end on the odd-numbered page in the tankōban, they must be separated by at least one page that fills the even-numbered gap.

Sketches, quotes, doors, all that extra stuff is really just there to make the structure of the tankōban a little more appealing to the reader. In my breakdown, "adjust" refers to an even-numbered page that is totally blank except for a MHA logo in the bottom corner.

So, 4-6 pages for legal stuff and at least 1 page separating each chapter (typically 8-12), plus a few pages of extra art like character pages or chapter doors, you can see why we end up with roughly 20 pages more than the total of the chapter pages combined.

With this information, let's imagine what Volume 42 might look like.

In this estimate, I just guessed it would have the same pattern of extras as Volume 37, since we know the final volume will have the results of the last WSJ popularity poll. This totals 146 pages, so basically, even accounting for the inter-chapter sketches, that's 38 pages of new, unknown content!

I've seen people guessing that the final volume will include the 2008 one-shot Horikoshi used as the basis for My Hero Academia, but I can basically guarantee you that won't happen, because when it was published in Akamaru Jump (which is now called Jump GIGA), it was 47 pages long. Yes, I went and found a Japanese blog post from January 2008 to verify this page count.

126 chapter pages + 4 legal pages + 8 adjustment pages between chapters + 4 pages for popularity poll + 47 one-shot pages = 189 pages, 5 pages too many. They would have to remove the adjustment pages to make it work, which totally fucks the flow of the manga.

Furthermore, the word used in the WSJ ad to describe the bonus material for the final volume (描き下ろし) specifically refers to drawings newly made for a special purpose. They simply would not use this to refer to a previously published manga being included.

For comparison, I researched the tankōban releases for a number of other WSJ series.

Dr. Stone and Mashle's final volumes were basically identical to their regular volumes in terms of extras and content. I also researched The Prince of Tennis and Naruto as older comparisons, but I couldn't find information exact enough to warrant inclusion, but what I saw more or less matched Dr. Stone and Mashle.

As you can see, Demon Slayer is the weird one here, and it's obvious why. The series ended during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Gotouge mentioned having a family member they needed to care for; a lot of people felt these issues contributed to Gotouge not being able to end the series as they had originally intended.

Demon Slayer chapters were typically 19 pages, but the last two chapters were 26 pages and 24 pages, uncommonly even-numbered. If you look at the final chapters and the epilogue in the tankōban, just numbers-wise, the ending could have been four 19-page chapters. But for whatever reason, that wasn't how it went down during serialization.

It's worth noting that the pages added to the tankōban do not change the ending, they merely provided greater emotional closure.

Side note but if anyone's gonna try and bring up Attack on Titan, I'm just gonna point out that AOT was a monthly manga published by Kodansha, a different company entirely. I imagine they have their own approach to marketing tankōban or special releases. You also have to consider the tastes and intentions of the creator, and hot take but I have absolutely no fucking positive opinions on that dude or his work, so it was no surprise to me that anything he added just made the ending worse.

TL;DR: Yes, it's a lot more than regular volumes! Content-wise, we'll probably get beautiful new illustrations and some revised page art that add details which improve pacing or themes. We might get a few extra chapter pages where a single serialized page gets turned into a big double-page spread, like we saw for Katsuki's fight with AFO.

There could be a couple new panels that bring more closure to things that were hinted at in the final chapters, who knows.

The only thing I personally want is a true bkdk handhold.

I'd love a double-page spread of Izuku taking Katsuki's hand and beaming up at him. Just insert it right there at the end before we see them all scampering off to make the world a better place. That would do my heart good.

#OOOOOOOOUGH #yes yes yes yes

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twinstarburst · 4 days ago

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