7-7-2026

Sources & Links

Transcript

This is Aside Manga News for July 7th, 2026.

On July 1st, the Japanese media company Sorajima has announced that they will be starting a new digital manga magazine in Japan. The new magazine will be called Shonen Stoke and will launch in April 2027. It will be based in a digital app that is currently being developed for iOS & Android, along with a web-browser view as well. As the name indicates, it will be focused on brand new shonen manga series created under the 5th editorial department at Sorajima.

Similar to webtoons, these new manga serializations will only be presented in a vertical scroll design. The editorial team is currently looking for new manga artists and authors in Japan to join for the launch of the app next year. Their editorial team can help adjust mangaka from the traditional page format to the vertical scroll layouts. They are planning on having both black-and-white as well as full color manga on the service. Each weekly chapter is planned to be 90 panels long, and the mangaka will receive a payment of 230,000 yen per story. Additional payments for longer chapters will be paid to the mangakas and they will receive royalties up to 20% based on future sales. With this being a new platform, all serialized authors will receive an initial down payment of 1 million yen to cover costs until royalties are paid out. The Shonen Stoke app will have all of the most recent chapters for their series be released for free, and previous chapters can be purchased at a cost. The editorial department is only planning on a select number of titles being added to the service. Sorajima is also holding a manga contest for Japanese creators to submit their titles. Links to the application will be available on our website as well as to all of our sources for this video.

Prior to this new Shonen Stoke app, Sorajima had several different editorial divisions since the company’s creation in February 2019. The first was setup for Romance Webtoons. Second was for Battle Webtoons. Third was “Yokoyomi Manga”. This published manga in a more traditional page format. The fourth was Yosumi, a manga reading platform that also contained various articles and a printed book division. Titles such as “The Reason for the Twin Lady’s Disguise” was one of their most popular titles from the Romance Webtoons division. It has over 37 million views on Webtoons in English. Various gains from similar hit titles did allow the entire company to have a net profit of over 50 million yen in the fiscal 2023 year. As of the fiscal year 2025, the company has significantly increased its debt and had a net loss of over 74 million yen. During this time, its total assets have increased as it prepares for this new digital manga magazine launch of Shonen Stoke in April 2027.