Monthly Shōnen Rival
Japanese manga magazine
Monthly Shōnen Rival (Japanese: 月刊少年ライバル, Hepburn: Gekkan Shounen Raibaru) was a Japanese monthly shōnen manga magazine by Kodansha that ran from April 4, 2008 to June 4, 2014. It was issued on the 4th of every month.
As with Shueisha's Jump Square and Shogakukan's Monthly Shōnen Sunday, it was aimed at audiences in their late-teens and early-twenties.
Shōnen Rival was a replacement of Comic BomBom, which ended in December 2007 due to decline in interest. Shōnen Rival followed the same fate and due to decline in interest the final issue was released on June 4, 2014. Kodansha noted that it was reassessing its manga magazine lineup to aim for more growth, and therefore stopped publication on Monthly Shōnen Rival and conducted research for the new magazine that would replace it.
Though most of the series had managed to end by the final issue, all unfinished series were transferred to online platforms such as Manga Box and Shin Zasshi Kenkyūjō (新雑誌研究所; lit. 'New Comic Research Institute').
Shōnen Rival Series
Reception
Originally in 2008 the magazine started with 300,000 in circulation per month, but due to decline in interest it felt down to 48,000 copies per month in 2013. By 2014, the circulation was 18,000.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Monthly Shōnen Rival” as japanese manga magazine. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as japanese manga magazine. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1062601. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2014, 2007 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Monthly Shōnen Rival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.