Kaiju are arguably at the heart of Japanese pop culture, at least if you consider 1954’s Gojira (Godzilla) to be the beginning of Japan’s domination of global pop culture. The stakes are high, the art is fluid and gorgeous, and the characters really carry you through it all.īuy a copy of My Hero Academia here! Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo It’s an entirely fleshed out world that is a joy to live in and journey through. One of the series’ biggest strengths is its enormous and colourful cast of characters, every one of whom is given a backstory, an arc, a unique quirk, personal motivation, and more.
#BEST NEW MANGA 2018 SERIES#
It’s a fantastic series that caters to kids of all ages, fans of comic book superheroes, fans of classic shonen manga, and everyone in-between. Whether you’ve seen the My Hero Academiamanga or you haven’t, this is a shonen manga deserving of its hype. The series is consistently smart, taking the moral questions, themes, and tropes of superhero comics and using them to carve out compelling new story arcs with speed and consistency. My Hero Academiahas been running for some time and it has gone from strength to strength. His dreams are dashed until a freak incident puts him in All Might’s path, and Japan’s greatest hero passes the power of his own quirk onto Deku. Our young shonen protagonist, Deku (real name Izuku Midoriya), worships Japan’s mightiest hero, All Might, only to find out that his own quirk never manifested. Not all of these manga are suitable for kids, despite being published in Shonen Jumpor being classified as shonen manga. So, be warned: shonen is growing up and the lines between what is and isn’t ‘mature’ are blurring. Shonen manga is going through a horror period right now and a lot of the manga on this list are dark, scary, bloody, and some even feature distressing scenes. This list also descents into darker territory as it does. By ‘slightly less well-known’ we mean the manga that isn’t yet adapted into anime (or is maybe soon to be adapted). We’ll start with the most popular shonen manga right now and move on to the slightly less well-known stuff. The Most Exciting Modern Shonen MangaĪs already mentioned above, these modern shonen manga aren’t in order of quality, but rather in a loose order of fame and accessibility. With these details and answers out of the way, let’s look at some of the best modern shonen manga that you should be reading right now. But that u is sometimes removed for the sake of simplicity and, so, shonen is an equally acceptable English spelling. In the hiragana alphabet, shounen is spelled しよぅねん (shi-yo-u-ne-n). Shonen or Shounen?Īs for the discrepancy between shonen and shounen, the latter is closer to the Japanese spelling. Not all shonen manga and shonen anime feature all (or even any) of these tropes, but they are still shonen tropes nonetheless.
That approach might seem outdated - and I certainly agree - but it’s still applicable to the shonen manga genre today. In Japanese, the word shonen/shounen is gender-nonspecific but, contextually, it refers to young boys specifically (with shojo/shoujo/少女 meaning young woman - thus, shoujo manga is its own genre.įor that reason, shonen manga features a lot of the themes and tropes that young boys relate to. The word shonen/shounen/少年 literally translates to ‘youth’, with the character 少 meaning small/few and 年 meaning year. Put simply, the classic or modern shonen manga definition is: manga aimed at a young male audience.