Magazine Special

Magazine Special (マガジンSPECIΑL) is a Japanese shōnen manga magazine published by Kodansha and first launched in 1983. Its audience demographic is geared toward younger teenage boys, and contents tend to be predominantly sports stories and high school romantic comedy. Many of the popular series in Magazine Special were transferred there from other Kodansha publications like Weekly Shōnen Magazine after their initial run. It is issued monthly on the 20th in perfect-bound B5 format and retails for 500 yen. Issues are typically about 600 pages printed in black and white on heavy newsprint, with a few glossy pages in color. Between 20 and 30 stories appear in each issue, almost all of them installments of ongoing and frequently long-running serials by different mangaka. In 2008 monthly circulation was reported at 84,667 copies by the Japan Magazine Publishers Association.