Proper Japanese Title: ヤングマガジン
Young Magazine was one of the major magazines of the new wave of manga that emerged in the 80's, supplanting 70's trends like gekiga with what more clearly became the modern lineage of seinen manga (magazines aimed at a younger but still adult male audience). Its biggest competitor (Young Jump) predated it by a year, and while both magazines were initially only published twice a month, Young Jump became Weekly Young Jump only a few months after Young Magazine launched. Young Magazine on the other hand remained a biweekly magazine for almost the entirety of the 80's and only became Weekly Young Magazine in early 1989.
Most of Young Magazine's notable authors and serializations carried over into the weekly edition of the magazine but many of them were already prominent through this era including Sho Fumimura, Kenshi Hirokane, Saimon Fumi, Kiuchi Kazuhiro, Katsuhiro Otomo, Makoto Kobayashi, Michiharu Kusunoki, Moriyama Tsuru, Harold Sakuishi and Sugimura Shinichi. Other authors who would later go on to be heavily associated with the weekly magazine made early career appearances like Nobuyuki Fukumoto, Shuichi Shigeno and Yuzo Takada.
Originally the covers used a mascot character (similar to Young Jump), but this robot character was soon abandoned for a brief stint of stylized pop-culture caricatures before the manga themselves began to periodicially get the cover feature. By 1982, Young Magazine began using female models for their covers but these types of covers were fairly in-line with a smattering of Weekly Shonen Magazine covers from the era. Yet with a fully topless model on the cover by the end of 1983, Young Magazine was the first of the major seinen magazines to shift into the gravure front-facing style that later became associated with much of the demographic (Young Jump was still regularly using its mascot character into the 90's).
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