On November 15, 2023, the first-ever Mangano Award was announced, representing 10 major manga publishers coming together to judge the best new manga. The Mangano Award submission period closes on February 15, 2024, and the results will be revealed in the summer of 2024. The award is open to any age, gender, skill level, and nationality, as long as the language used is Japanese. The editors from each participating magazine will deliberate and choose a winner. Genre categories weren’t listed, with editor Hirasawa from Hakusensha praising the unusual format of the new award, calling it, “a new style that is not bound by the framework of girls and boys.“
The manga publishers (magazines) involved in the Mangano Award are:
- Shinchosha (Kurage Bunch)
- Mag Garden (Monthly Comic Magazine)
- ASCII Media Works (Monthly Comic Dengeki Daioh)
- Kodansha (Monthly Shonen Magazine)
- Square Enix (Monthly Big Gangan)
- Shogakukan (Sunday Webry)
- Shueisha (Shonen Jump+)
- Coamix (Monthly Comic Zenon)
- Hakusensha (Hana to Yume)
- Akita Shoten (Manga Cross)
The Mangano Award guarantees a winner for each prize. The Grand Prize winner will receive 2mn yen (~$13k), the Runner-up will receive 500,000 yen (~$3.3k), the Honorable Mention will receive 100,000 yen (~$660), with a final candidate receiving 3,000 yen (~$20). Candidates who don’t receive a reply may still be contacted by editors from any publisher to be scouted. Submissions of any genre can be made via the Mangano website. The manga must be a complete one-shot, up to 120 pages long, and as long as the work isn’t commercially published, even manga that is already available online is acceptable. All the terms and conditions are available here.
Yuta Momiyama, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Shueisha’s Shonen Jump+ outlined the importance of the Mangano Award in an X post dated November 15:
“Readers in this world have diversified. Shouldn’t manga award judges also be more diverse? By having editors from various genres like boys’ comics, girls’ comics, and youth comics judge works from different angles and perspectives, I hope that strengths and talents hidden until now can be discovered through this manga award and given the chance to blossom. Both professional and amateur works can be submitted, and the deadline is February 15, 2024. As long as it is an unpublished one-shot work, existing publicly released works can also be submitted. We look forward to many entries!“
Mangano is an art and manga posting platform first launched in 2021 by Shueisha and tech company Hatena, allowing creators to monetize their work through advertising and sales. The launch of the Mangano Award, open to any skill level, comes as Shueisha‘s MANGA Plus Creators submission platform launched in 2022 attempts to increase their pool of rookie-level talent, recently seen again with the Shueisha World Maker and Netflix Anime Contest. Attracting pro-level talent is also a clear priority as Shueisha recently unveiled plans to draw more experienced writers from other magazines. Having publishers come together like this is rare in the industry, so it will be exciting to see which works come of it. The Mangano Award joins similar prestigious awards like the Shogakukan Manga Award or Kodansha Manga Award.
Source: Mangano Award Website
Featured image: Bakuman © Tsugumi Ohba・Takeshi Obata/Shueisha
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