With the amount of mangas being released monthly across the United States ranging in genres from shonen and shoujo to seinen and josei, there are two manga series that were released during the 2000s that were never released here, but in all fairness should have because of their great action and story lines. They are Medaka Box and History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi. Both are shonen mangas meant for older teens and because of their action, comedy and martial arts, they are very popular and their animes based on them are very popular as well. I was lucky to have read them thanks to the great fan translating community, but I would love the physical copies to have in my collection just because they are among my all time favorite series. Probably one of the main reasons why their anime adaptations remained incomplete is because since they did not have the western release of their manga’s it was hard to gauge true interest in the show. This western market is very important now to animation studios because knowing whether a show is licensed for release in the west can determine if it gets a second season or not. If one of the series got licensed, hopefully that would draw interesting in completing their anime adaptations because they truly are underrated masterpieces.
One solution I feel could work is for one of the publishing companies to announce the mangas in the form of a kickstarter to gauge interest and have the manga volumes as the pledge goals. So say for $5 you get a digital copy of the first volume for $10 you get a physical copy as well as the digital copy. From there the rewards keep stacking in increments until you get to the large prizes. So with Medaka Box and its 22 volumes it would very easy to break into individual increments or put the whole collection in a one of the new Viz Box collections or in omnibuses. There are many ways now for the publishing companies to engage fans to see what they would want as the next major series release. While Kenichi is a much longer work, i feel something along the same lines could be done for a such a great series as well.
