Manga Mania Magazine

Launched in July 1993, Manga Mania lasted 45 issues - its sometimes sporadic publishing schedule meaning that took it into summer of 1998. In 1999 the title was relaunched as Manga Max. You can read more about the history of the magazine at All the Anime.

In its original form, the magazine was the UK’s first manga anthology. Although it also featured anime and manga news, features and reviews, the majority of each issue was taken up by serialised comics. Manga Mania was launched by the UK arm of Dark Horse Comics in 1993, under founding editor Cefn Ridout, who had been working on a number of licensed tie-in titles like Aliens, Star Wars and Jurassic Park.

“I’d recently returned from Japan,” he recalls, “where I was bowled over by the oversized manga anthologies, and felt that some kind of fusion between those and what DHI was doing could work in the UK. Especially as our US parent company had hooked up with Toren Smith’s Studio Proteus to translate, reprint and publish manga for the US direct market. At the time, there was also growing interest in anime in the UK in the wake of Akira’s popularity. Manga [Entertainment] and Kiseki [Films], were promoting and distributing anime videos while anime movies and TV series pulled in the crowds at conventions.”

Ridout saw the potential in launching a title aimed at this new audience and luckily the higher-ups at Dark Horse agreed. “Our first coup was landing the rights to publish the Akira manga, using Marvel’s translation and printing film, which became the backbone of Manga Mania.” Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian epic went on to become the magazine’s killer app and ran from the first issue until its completion in issue 37.

At the time, collecting manga in the UK generally meant shelling out for expensive, flopped US Import editions from your local comic shop (if you were even lucky enough to have a local that carried it). As such, £2.50 a month for more than 100 pages of manga was a godsend for fans. A number of other manga were serialised alongside Akira over the years, mostly reproductions of material already available in the USA such as Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, Gunsmith Cats, 3×3 Eyes, and Silent Möbius. But Manga Mania also featured the English-language debut of Monkey Punch’s Shin Lupin III manga, some years before Tokyo Pop’s version. ...

Barely a year after the first issue was published, Dark Horse pulled out of the UK market. Manga Entertainment swooped in, acquiring Dark Horse International’s portfolio as a means to launch a ready-made publishing arm of its own. Not long afterwards Manga Entertainment pulled out of publishing altogether, selling the entire subsidiary to Titan. In 1997, it re-emerged closer to its original form, this time under the editorship of Helen McCarthy, whose own Anime FX had folded a year earlier.

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01	02	03	04
05	06	07	08
09	10	11	12
13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28
29	30	31	32
33	34	35	36
37	38	39	40
41	42	43	44
45	xx	xx	xx

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#01. July 1993.
#02. August 1993.
#03. September 1993.
#04. October 1993.
#05. November 1993.
#06. December 1993.
#07. January 1994.
#08. February 1994.
#09. March 1994.
#10. April 1994.
#11. June 1994.
#12. July 1994.
#13. August 1994.
#14. September 1994.
#15. October 1994.
#16. Novembr 1994.
#17. December 1994.
#18. January 1995.
#19. February 1995.
#20. March 1995.
#21. April 1995.
#22. May 1995.
#23. June 1995.
#24. July 1995.
#25. August 1995.
#26. September 1995.
#27. October 1995.
#28. November 1995.
#29. December 1995.
#30. January 1996.
#31. February 1996.
#32. March 1996.
#33. April 1996.
#34. May 1996.
#35. June 1996.
#36. July 1996.
#37. August 1996.
#38. September 1996.
#39. October 1996.
#40. January/February 1997.
#41. July/August 1997.
#42. October/November 1997.
#43. February 1998.
#44. March/April 1998.
#45. May/June 1998.