I work at a pretty big comic shop with a large selection of manga, and I have to say that High School Debut is our second biggest shojo title, right behind Love Com.

How popular is it where you are? And how popular is it in Japan?

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Where I live, most of the time manga = Naruto...

Quote from blakraven66

Where I live, most of the time manga = Naruto...

Boourns. Not that Naruto isn't good, but that makes me think to when I was in high school (uh, way too long ago) and you had a choice of Sailor Moon (WIN! despite the horrible dub), Inu Yasha, or Dragon Ball Z

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Naruto is popular not because it is the best but because it is a continuity manga, and people tend to keep wanting to know what happens NEXT and what WILL happen later in the FUTURE, and ongoing manga such as Naruto allows that to happen for people, and so people keep giving chances of survival in manga such as Naruto and thus making it more popular in terms amount of people who read it and shit.

I have no clue how popular it is where I am (in Canada). Most of the people I know don't read manga but both my sister and I loved it. 😀

That aside, I do agree with Chimasternmay. Naruto isn't the BEST manga but its continuing storyline makes it impossible to not finish. 😃 All the same, I really like it but I wish the weekly chapters were a bit longer since I hate the very short chapters with cliffhangers >:-(

i really hate those blasted short chapters that is so damn prevalent in mangas like Naruto and Bleach. Really, are you guys so low to milk us like this or too damn lazy to do a few more pages?

Well..it IS big where I come from, but within a smaller circle. I tend to think of my customers as having genre favorites within manga. Shonen readers will read action, and have Naruto/One Piece as their leader, Seinen readers have Beserk and Vagabond etc while Shoujo fans are a little more spread in their love, and much more split. You have the readers who love Yu Watase and historical romance, then you have readers who love Yaoi/Reverse harems, and then you have people like me; Who love an old fashioned first love story as a comforting way to relax. Actually I believe ALL manga readers are different and buy different things in terms of what they feel like, or what they know. HS Debut is not a massive seller in my local shop, but the first 2 volumes always sell out. Every dedicated shoujo collector has it on their manga orders, and feedback is that they love it. I mean who wouldn't love Haruna? She is so awesome! I read this sort of manga for nostalgia, and I need a female character who is personable enough for me to cheer her on. You will find that some shoujo readers find this shoujo boring because they are only interested in male characters, and Yoh is not dynamic enough to hold their interest. He isn't abusive, sexually demanding or even rude. Some readers HATE that, isn't it weird? I happen to like Yoh, he's sweet and awkward, just like the real HS boys I dated 🤣

Too Weird to Live. Too Rare to Die. - HST.

im in canada (the french part) and i think its pretty populor with the younger kids (naruto <--- 🙁 i hates it so much 🤢 )
and my generation was crazy for the pokemons and the yugioh cards but manga was still a little uncommon(exept dragonball and all of the classics)
i just turned 18 today!
and in my class of cegep(if your not from quebec you wont know what that is)
i was suprised by the number of people who read mangas 🙂 .
must be the fact we study in multimedias 🤣
manga is getting a little more populor(you find them in every good bookstores, even at COSTCOS! 🤣 )
but animes(or shit that tries to immitate it) are litteraly on every channel a kid could watch.
but what i dont like is the fact french trad mangas cost twice as much as eng trad mangas >:-( and the english ones dont come out as fast
so im stuck paying 15$can with( 10% off thanks to my good friend membership card 😉 )

all in all i belive manga ha just started getting some momentum since the late 90s
so in a few years I should be considered fashionable 🤣

Naruto and such are so popular in western countries because they don't understand anime or manga. To them it's just Japanese cartoons and Japanese comics. To them it's a children's show, nothing else.

My first time watching anime dubbed to a foreign language was when my friend once showed me Pokemon with English dub. I watched some earliest episodes of Pokemon, and I think it was pretty good considering what I expected, but with English dub, not just Pokemon, but every single anime, is ruined. They give off that children's show aura. The character designs become all children's cartoon type because the voices (and also the stupid translations) change their personality completely.

I think the basic reason is because they can't accept Japanese culture as it is, but must change everything to match American taste. In some animes even the names are changed to English names, though it doesn't really matter if they're English names, or Japanese names pronounced in that horrible way that English speaking people tend to pronounce Japanese.

Anyways, the popularity of ANIME in North America isn't very big. When it's made American, then it's not Japanese anymore. Anime is Japanese, not American.

Character voices, pronouncing Japanese, the names itself and music are all a big part of anime, but with manga there's no such things, (or do they change the names in some manga?) so things are looking better for manga in North America. Of course the translation is still an issue, but so it is with other literature. Generally, I don't believe in translation, but on the other hand, I can't speak all the languages in the world either. Though even if you can understand pretty much everything in mangas like Naruto and Bleach, there are also mangas where you miss major part of the important stuff unless you read it in it's original language. There are of course other factors in understanding the manga than language. Aside from technical stuff of sports manga, references and such, also understanding the culture is important. But this isn't the issue here.

Well... I went off topic simply because: I opened this topic and had to write something, but this wasn't a question which I have anything to say directly (or maybe I just wanted to bash anime dub lovers, and Naruto lovers in an indirect way). Well whatever, I already forgot my original motive. Maybe I just didn't pay attention and went off topic without noticing it like I often do...

Far-off places with sweet sounding names.

Everyone knows Naruto and Bleach but... with Japanese University students, One Piece tends to be more popular/well liked in my experience.

I dunno what to put here at all...

Quote from Chimasternmay

Naruto is popular not because it is the best but because it is a continuity manga, and people tend to keep wanting to know what happens NEXT and what WILL happen later in the FUTURE, and ongoing manga such as Naruto allows that to happen for people, and so people keep giving chances of survival in manga such as Naruto and thus making it more popular in terms amount of people who read it and shit.

No man, it's only ongoing because it's popular. Not popular because it's ongoing. That's the stupidest thing I've heard.

You know what else WAS popular and ongoing? Shaman King. But popularity dropped so the published cut it short and thus the author had to rush the ending.