Viz’s Weekly Shonen Jump makes the news with something for US readers to read while WSJ in Japan teases fans with something they will want to read.

Viz has a new Jump Start series starting this week in Weekly Shonen Jump. Mononofu is the new series by Haruto Ikezawa, and is starting in Weekly Shonen Jump both here and Japan. It is about Shinobu, a boy who isn’t really good at doing anything, accidentally moves into a share-house for aspiring shogi professionals.  Ikezawa’s previous series, Kurogane, ended in 2013 with 8 collected volumes. I like the sound of this series. I like game manga about a real game,  and I know very little about shogi, other than it is called Japanese Chess, so this series has a lot of potential. Hopefully the chapters will be well received here and in Japan.

Joining Mononofu is the new series Samon the Summoner. It’s about a high school student named Samon who is a summoner. Pretty basic, right? It’s being described as an “demon-like unusual comedy.” The word “unusual” sends up flags for me, as describing something as unusual can be good or bad. I’ll just have to wait and see. It will debut in next week’s Weekly Shonen Jump both in the US and Japan.

Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump announced new, special chapters of Bakuman, the series about aspiring manga creators by Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba. There will be two chapters, and will be a prequel to the main series, showing Mashiro and Takagi when they were 13, before they met in middle school. These special chapters were created to celebrate the opening of the live action movie based on the Bakuman manga. Viz will run these chapters on the same day as Japan, in next week’s Weekly Shonen Jump.

Related to the Bakuman manga is a new novel that Shueisha is also publishing at the beginning of October through the Jump j Books imprint. PCP -Kanzen Hanzaito- (PCP -Perfect Crime Party-) is the first novel based on the manga series created by “Muto Ashirogi”, Mashiro and Takagi’s pen name in the Bakuman manga. It is about three students who form a club in order to carry out the “perfect crime.” PCP  was a series I would have loved to have read in real life, so a novel being created based on it sounds really cool. Too bad we probably will never see it in print in English, since Viz doesn’t do prose, or at least, hasn’t for several years now.