CoroCoro Comic

Walk into any Japanese bookstore on the 15th of the month and you will see it: a brick of a magazine, roughly 750 pages, shrink-wrapped around a plastic toy or a promo card. That is CoroCoro Comic, the Shogakukan anthology that has been aimed at elementary-school boys since its first issue on May 15, 1977. The name comes from the Japanese phenomime korokoro, a word for something small and rolling, which tells you plenty about the audience it was built for.

The editorial bet from day one was tie-ins. Instead of waiting for a manga to become popular and then licensing a toy, CoroCoro built serializations around toys, video games, and anime, and delivered them to children first. Doraemon turned into a national institution through its pages, and the Pokémon manga and promotional cards that ran in the magazine helped turn a Game Boy cartridge into a worldwide franchise. By April 2017, when the magazine marked its 40th anniversary, it had moved about 400 million copies. The format has barely changed: the August 2026 issue was No. 580, and flip-through videos of the December 2025 and October 2025 issues show the same thick, gift-stuffed package.

Shogakukan, one of Japan's big three manga publishers, runs CoroCoro as an imprint rather than a standalone company, and it has grown a small family of siblings: Bessatsu CoroCoro Comic and CoroCoro Ichiban!, both bi-monthly, plus the quarterly CoroCoro Aniki for older readers, which folded in March 2021. Online, the free Weekly CoroCoro Comic site now carries titles that used to run in print, including Duel Masters RX, which moved there in April 2026. The brand also licenses its manga abroad, most visibly in a July 2026 deal with IDW Publishing for the first English translation of Sonic the Hedgehog: The Blade of Courage.

The last few years have been eventful. Doraemon's serialization in Monthly CoroCoro ended in April 2026, and later reporting tied the exit to a dispute reportedly set off by a publishing blunder. New series keep arriving, though, and the promotional cards that come bagged with the magazine have turned into serious collector's items: a 1996 CoroCoro Pikachu promo led weekly trading-card sales at $1.3 million in August 2026. For a kids' magazine, that is a strange and very CoroCoro kind of second life. [edit]