Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Manga Wins Best Shonen Award At The 48th Kodansha Manga Awards
Medalist by Tsurumaikada beats Oshi No Ko to win the Best General Manga award.
The results of the aforementioned Kodansha’s 48th annual manga awards on April 8, 2024, has finally been announced and it looks like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End has bagged the award for Best Shonen Manga while Medalist by Tsurumaikada beats Oshi No Ko to win the Best General Manga award.
Without further ado, here are the winners in the following 3 categories, along with their nominations for the 48th Kodansha Manga Awards!
Best General Manga
Winner: Medalist by Tsurumaikada
Synopsis: Tsukasa, whose dreams were crushed. Inori, left to fend for herself. These two share a dream…and their tenacity may be the only thing that sees them through. Their destination? The ice…on the world’s stage!
Nominees:
- Oshi No Ko by Aka Akasaka and Mengo Yokoyari
- The Darwin Incident by Shun Umezawa
- Chiikawa by Nagano
- Nagatan to Ao to: Ichika no Ryōrichō by Yuki Isoya
- Bōkyō Tarō by Yoshihiro Yamada
Best Shōnen Manga
Winner: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe
Synopsis: The adventure is over but life goes on for an elf mage just beginning to learn what living is all about.
Elf mage Frieren and her courageous fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. But Frieren will long outlive the rest of her former party. How will she come to understand what life means to the people around her?
Decades after their victory, the funeral of one her friends confronts Frieren with her own near immortality. Frieren sets out to fulfill the last wishes of her comrades and finds herself beginning a new adventure…
Nominees:
- The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity by Saka Mikami
- Gachiakuta by Kei Urana
- Tank Chair by Manabu Yashiro
- Daemons of the Shadow Realm by Hiromu Arakawa
Best Shōjo Manga
Winner: I See Your Face, Turned Away by Rumi Ichinohe
Synopsis: Hikari’s your typical freshmen in high school who’s been recently daydreaming about Mari’s, her shy best friend, love story. She decides to ship Mari with Ootani-kun, their classmate, after finding out about his crush on Mari when his friend, Asagiri-kun, tried getting the two to talk. The main character is Mari, the leading man is Ootani, and Hikari is the typical best friend in the story. Not bad… right? A youthful story between four kids going through unrequited love.
Nominees:
- A Sign of Affection by Suu Morishita
- In the Clear Moonlit Dusk by Mika Yamamori
- Firefly Wedding by Oreko Tachibana
Last year in 2023, the best general manga went to Skip and Loafer, best Shonen manga to Shangri-La Frontier and best Shojo manga to My Girlfriend’s Child.
The Kodansha Manga Award, hosted by Kodansha, stands as a prestigious accolade in Japan’s vibrant manga industry. Established in 1977, it celebrates outstanding serialized manga across three main categories: shōnen, shōjo, and general.
Beginning with distinctions for the shonen and shojo genres, the award later expanded to include the general category in 1982 and a children’s category in 2003. Notably, since 2015, the children’s category has been integrated into the shōnen and shōjo classifications.
About Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End:
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is a manga series written by Kanehito Yamada and illustrated by Tsukasa Abe. It has been serialized in Shogakukan’s shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Sunday since April 2020, with its chapters collected in twelve tankōbon volumes as of December 2023.
The first season of the anime, produced by Studio MADHOUSE, aired from September 2023 to March 2024.
Viz Media Describes the manga as follows:
‘The adventure is over, but life goes on for an elf mage just beginning to learn what living is all about.
Elf Mage Frieren and her courageous fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. But Frieren will long outlive the rest of her former party.
How will she come to understand what life means to the people around her? Decades after their victory, the funeral of one of her friends confronts Frieren with her own near immortality.
Frieren sets out to fulfill the last wishes of her comrades and finds herself beginning a new adventure…”
Source: Kodansha’s official Twitter
