“Spy x Family” and Manga’s Digital Shift

Overturning Conventional Wisdom

In 2019, something extraordinary happened in the world of manga. Just 22 days after the publication of the first volume of Endō Tatsuya’s Spy x Family, originally serialized on Shūeisha’s Shōnen Jump+ app and website, it had more than 300,000 copies in circulation. This was head and shoulders above the figures for the first volume of any other manga at the time.

Three characters overflowing with individuality conceal their various secrets as they face difficulties together in the spy action comedy Spy x Family. Images from episode 3. (© Endō Tatsuya/Shūeisha)

The new hit was showered with prizes, including being recognized as the best manga for men in the 2020 edition of the publication Kono manga ga sugoi (This Manga is Amazing!). The first print run of its sixth volume, released in December 2020, ran to 1 million copies. Many were surprised at this level of success for an app-based manga, which overturned what was then to a degree conventional wisdom that only print manga series from magazines could achieve million-copy megahit first editions.

Comedy Meets Spy Action

The story is set in a fictional world in which the neighboring countries of Ostania and Westalis are engaged in information warfare. On the surface, Loid is an Ostanian psychiatrist, living with his wife Yor and their adopted daughter Anya. However, this is not a genuine family—Loid is a Westalian spy, Yor is an assassin, and Anya is a telepath to whom her adoptive parents’ secrets are an open book. The complicated setup makes for a kind of family drama in which elements of comedy are overlaid onto spy action.

In autumn 2024, streaming service Abema made the hit Spy x Family anime available for free for three consecutive weeks. Screenshot from Abema promotional materials. (© Endō Tatsuya/Shūeisha/Spy x Family Production Committee)

The Spy x Family anime adaptation started its broadcast run on TV Tokyo and affiliate stations in April 2022. A musical premiered at the Imperial Theater, Tokyo, in March 2023, while the manga has also been adapted into a video game and a podcast audio drama. Spy x Family won the grand prize in the comic division at the 2023 Japan Cartoonists Association Awards, and the manga has more than 36 million copies in circulation, up to and including its fourteenth volume, published in October 2024.

Free Episodes

Shōnen Jump+, which publishes Spy Family every other week, was launched in September 2014. The app-based service distributes its own original works as well as an electronic version of the Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine, making the first and latest three episodes of its original series available for free. In April 2019, it started a service allowing readers to enjoy a complete series free of charge once per app.

The Shōnen Jump+ smartphone home page. (© Shūeisha)

Free access to many popular works, based on the number of views and comments, as well as the chance to discover new favorites are major benefits for readers. Print magazines including a variety of works have previously allowed readers to find series that meet their tastes, and created feelings of community and the sense of manga as a social phenomenon. I feel these print traditions and ways of thinking are also fostered in digital manga. After Spy x Family, other hit series such as Matsumoto Naoya’s Kaijū No. 8 have emerged.

From January 2019, Shūeisha has targeted the international market via its Manga Plus app and website, which releases translated episodes in English simultaneously with the Japanese-language originals. This is another advantage of the digital age.

The full-length feature Spy x Family Code: White, released in December 2023, was a major domestic hit, drawing 4.4 million viewers and grossing ¥6.2 billion at the box office. It was also successful overseas; the photograph is from a cinema in Shanghai, China. (© Reuters)

Japan’s Varied Magazine Market

As apps thrive, Japan’s manga market seems to be in revival. However, I think the success of Shōnen Jump+ and Spy x Family is furthering the transition from the old guard to new names, and I fear it may trigger print magazines to suspend publication or cease altogether.

Until now, manga have typically started out in print magazines before being collected in tankōbon digests, and adapted to anime or film. After this, themed goods are produced and the manga finds an international fan base.

Naturally, Japan is not the only country that produces comics. However, I think one can say that it is unique in having dozens of weekly and monthly manga magazines targeted primarily at different readers—like shōnen (boys), seinen (young men), and shōjo (girls)—with nearly 20 manga series in each, and in its regular publication of digests.

For example, Shūeisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump is where Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, and Demon Slayer got started. The same publisher’s Weekly Young Jump for seinen readers was the launchpad for Kingdom and Golden Kamuy. Shōgakukan’s Weekly Shōnen Sunday serialized Inuyasha and Detective Conan. Kōdansha’s Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine hosted Attack on Titan, while its Weekly Young Magazine for seinen readers published Akira and its shōjo monthly Nakayoshi was where Sailor Moon made its debut.

Without dedicated magazines, Japanese manga would not be what it is today. However, these magazines, which supported the roots of the manga industry, now face the threat of extinction.

Data published each February by the Research Institute for Publications shows that in 2014, there were estimated sales of ¥131.3 billion for print magazines, ¥225.6 billion for print digests (tankōbon), and ¥88.7 billion for e-comics. In 2023, however, print magazines sales plummeted by more than half to ¥49.7 billion and print digest sales dropped by nearly a third to ¥161.0 billion, for a combined decrease of around 40% for print titles. Meanwhile, e-comic sales grew more than fivefold to ¥483.0 billion.

In the great shift from print to digital content, a change in reader behavior is a prominent cause of the decline in print magazines, which were the main place to enjoy manga until the end of the 1990s. Readers subscribed to the publications they liked, or bought them faithfully each week, and discovered favorite manga series through them. Each time a magazine was published, they would read its new episodes of around 20 pages each, and look forward to what would happen in the next edition.

Entering the 2000s, however, instead of following new episodes through the magazines, readers tended to wait for the publication of a digest. Japan’s long-lasting economic slump probably played a part in this change in habits. Rather than buying a new magazine every week, skipping over the titles in it they found less enthralling, readers found it more cost-effective to read their favorite works in tankōbon form.

Making Up for Print Losses

Readers’ pursuit of cost efficiency put pressure on the business of magazine publishers. In the mid-1990s, Weekly Shōnen Jump had a record circulation of 6.5 million, and the break-even point for weekly shōnen manga was said to be a circulation of 1 million. In other words, publishers needed this level of circulation in order to produce a 500-page publication with around 20 serialized manga without going into the red, given the costs for manuscripts, printing, binding, transportation, and bookstore margins. The break-even point for seinen manga was more forgiving, at a circulation of around 500,000.

However, according to the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, while the average circulation for Weekly Shōnen Jump for April to June 2024 was 1,090,000, or just above the 1-million line, its rivals Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Weekly Shōnen Sunday had circulations of 320,000 and 130,000, respectively. There were no magazines with a circulation of over 1 million in the seinen, shōjo, and josei (women readers) categories. It is easy to imagine that most magazines are making losses.

While there are still many printed manga magazines in bookstores, their circulation is steadily declining. (© Nippon.com)

Publishers have not given up on print magazines, however, as the income from the intellectual property—including via digests, anime, and movies—can make up for their losses. For some years now, publishers have been switching emphasis from traditional publishing to the rights and IP business. For example, Shūeisha had income of ¥51.1 billion for nondigital publishing in the period from June 2023 to May 2024, compared with ¥72.0 billion for digital publishing and ¥75.3 billion for business including publishing rights and sale of goods. Publishing print magazines can become a way of amassing saleable content for the rights business.

Digital Era Finally Here

The long standstill in the digital manga market helped print magazines. E-comics started drawing attention in the mid-1990s after the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 95 opened up the internet for commercial use. Later in the decade, broadband access began to become standard.

In 2003, Au launched an online service for comics to be read on LCD mobile phone screens. Others entered the market, and there was a minor boom in boys’ love and teens’ love titles, but print maintained its dominance. Then, with the arrival in Japan of Apple’s iPhone in 2008, full-fledged e-comics became possible. In 2013, webtoons—vertical manga designed for reading on smartphones, originating in South Korea—began to be published in Japan.

From the start of the 2010s, each new year seemed to be heralded as the first of the e-book era. The e-comic market did not grow as much as expected, however, and print magazines in particular continued their ascendancy over their digital counterparts. The Research Institute for Publications did not start publishing statistics on e-comic sales until 2014, when Shūeisha launched Shōnen Jump+; but five years later in 2019, the year Spy x Family began, the digital market overtook that for print.

Now that print magazines are losing their advantage for amassing and packaging content, and the market for digital apps and comics is expanding, will print media—particularly magazines—come to an end? If not, what form will they take in the future? The exploration of the 80-year postwar history of manga in this series of articles may provide some hints toward the change to be expected.

(Originally published in Japanese on October 27, 2024. Banner image: Spy x Family is a megahit on the manga app Shōnen Jump+. © Endō Tatsuya/Shūeisha.)