Unbound manga - bound for oblivion
I like to imagine of manga in tiers. There are the ones licensed in your respective country, able to be bought at the odd store specialized in them or just your regular old book store, they're all around us. Now there are scanlated manga, if you surf the waves of the web you may come across some kind soul who offered a translation to a manga unlicensed, making you able to engage with it nonetheless. But what if there's no scanlation but a bound volume available in Japan, scanlators can't scanlate everything after all. It may be hard to engage with, the barrier of entry is high; you need to import it from the land of the rising sun. Though with a little help of a proxy or ebook storefronts you're able to get it, and if you're knowledgeble in the Japanese language or just use a machine translation you'd still be able to read your beloved manga. This spiral of obscurity doesn't end here however…
Let's imagine that you're some mangaka and your work has the honour to be published in a magazine with a little caveat added, this is only a test run limited to 3 or so chapters. Manga is a highly compatitive industry and there's precedent made by various magazines already (including my favorite: the Manga Time Kirara family) so this is a realistic szenario I might add. The run ends and disaster strikes, your manga won't get picked for further serialization getting axed before it could even metaphorically walk. Your manga technichally got printed, it's available in the magazines, but a bound volume will never see the light of day. One would need to get all the magazines you got featured in to get the full experience of what you intended, and, as most people don't scower though manga magazine catalogues, your work is slowly being forgotten.
This is what I propose to be the end of the spiral, the unbound manga, that is a manga never bound into a single volume andd most often left untranslated. Their state is one of Limbo, if you buy the issues the manga featured in you'd have them all but this is far more inconvenient; the older they are the more unlikely a digital version becomes, you'd need to locate a lot more print media if serialized and so on. We've become so accustomed to the luxary of the manga volume that this very state seems alien. It's a manga, yes, but it doesn't even feel like one. It's a series of chapters sandwiched between some others, incohesive and without even a cover to make us believe it's one entity. Every long running manga does start out like this but we'll only see the ones that were successful enough to break free of their magazine shaped shell.
In the following paragraphs I will provide examples of this category, to give these series a whiff of recognation that will counteract them from being truely forgotten. A fate they've never deserved. I'd like you to do the same however, if there are manga you like it's highly likely it has been published in a magazine, and if there's a magazine there are a plethora of issues you could browse through to maybe find another example, and if you did so I'd love to know more about it :)
Note: The category I provide examples for specifically are unbound, untranslated and were serialized, which here just means there were at least two chapters published and may have gotten more. One shots can of course fall into this category too but I didn't really consider them as much writing this post :/
Akane-sora Kaiitan
A yuri manga with supernatural elements by Younomado published in Manga Time Kirara MAX issues 2024/02 and 2024/03 encompassing its stunning amount of two chapters. For some reason numbers are used to indicate the chapters which makes it hurt even more. Admittadly, it has the label "special guest" and most of these seires don't seem to make it far, I'm pretty sure just by searching スペシャルゲスト on the Kirara Twitter there'd be plenty of other examples I could gone into. It's about Asuha (pink hair), a girl who can see inhuman things, meeting a mysterious girl calling herself Amon (green hair) during an evening in school. She's shortly after kissed by her and thus starts the story proper.
Anyway, this is one of these short lived series I've found in the Manga Time Kirara MAX copy I own and I thought was pretty cool, having supernatural elements with an occcult touch together with the squishy moe artstyle, an actually really cool action scene for a Yonkoma in chapter two, and Yuri. It would've been cooler if it lasted for more than two chapters though. After the end it asks the reader for their impressions which is nice but considering it followed the final chapter it just feels ominous. Searching for pictures on Twitter I even found someone hoping for it to get serialized, encouraging who sees their tweet to support the series, and I just couldn't help to but feel sorry for them. They later got into a conversation which the author on this same platform. He stated that appearantly this was seen as Yuri targeted at women, no one engaged in this conversation has heard of this before laughing off the term, and appearantly Amon was an example of it being women Yuri, it's then added that Horror (if not comedic) does not fly too well in the Kirara environment.
So yeah, maybe gender prejudice killed this manga together a lacking will to take risks. It might be worthy to note that the Kirara target audience is young men, even if anyone can enjoy cute girls doing cute things.
Chikachika Tarte Tatin
First published in the magazine Febri and later moved to the Purizm, with both being published by Ichijinsha, best known for releasing Comic Yurihime, this manga by Mitsuki Mouse/tica85 bookstores is so obscure that I couldn't even find a synopsis. The blonde girl is called Tarte though and it seems to be a gag series from a chapter I've looked into by its entry in Febri issue 58, when she and her Sushi shop get stranded on an uninhabited island only to get found by the other characters, one being the brown haired girl, the other a cat. It has achieved the grand feat of being serialized for more than two chapters however, only issue being that all of these may have had a page count of two. Chapters weren't numbered and their total count is to me unkown, I'd make an estimate of 60 or so, which might be just enough warrant one volume compiling everything. This didn't happen, the author has gone radio silent and the series didn't get any updates after 2022, seemingly ending it's 12 year long run (it really got serialized for this long, starting with Febri issue 9). A tweet from 2010 foretold the lack of a tankoubon volume, a newer one dated 2024 hoped for it, and it may have been the first who's proven right. I will feature more tica85/Mouse more indepth in a future post, as their work is quite extensive and in my view deeply interesting. I also just love the soft muted color pallete present in their artwork and don't want it being forgotten. Now that I'm a proud owner of a digital Febri issue I might scanlate these pages, though I can't guarantee anything.
Conclusion
I probably only scratched the surface by taking two titles out of a far larger pool of examples but it should prove my point. There just are some manga which due to various circumstances may not be easily available, thus stifing any attention they could've gotten. Despite this, I think that we're able to counteract this somehow, beyond the confines of social media discourse there still are plenty of things left untouched and it only needs us to search the sea of information that the cyberspace provides to eventually find such titles again. It's hard to get over the language barrier, and put in all the effort without even knowing a clearcut path, but it probably only is a matter of time until they completely get lost otherwise. The tools already are available, we only need to use them!