Happy 10th Birthday to Tomoko and Nozaki-kun!

No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! began publishing in the 8/4/2011 issue of Gangan Online and Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun and began publishing in the 8/25/2011 issue. Both manga have been running ever since!

These two series are pretty different, but they have some things in common. They both have moments of parodying shoujo tropes, they're two personal favorites of Yen Press, and they're both absolutely hilarious! Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun is a 4-panel comedy - truly one of the best to be published in English. No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! is also a comedy...a really cringe one at that (Can we still say cringe? Is cringe out of date? Is it cringe that I said cringe?).

Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun is about a girl named Sakura who falls in love with the tall, handsome, and obtuse Nozaki, who semi-secretly creates shoujo manga. She confesses her love for him, but he thinks she's a fan who wants to be his manga assistant! The two are quickly surrounded by a cast of high-school weirdos, who Nozaki takes inspiration from and who run into their own romantic foibles.

One of the most fun aspects of Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun is the episodic nature of the series. If you have a basic understanding of who the characters are, you can just pick up any volume at random, and it will be fine and funny without the need for having read the full series...continuity be damned! The day that Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun ends may eventually come our way, but it is an amazing work with a clear tried and true formula that can go on for as long as Izumi Tsubaki is willing to grace us with her amazing manga.

No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, which some fans might know better under the abbreviated Japanese title of Watamote, is about Tomoko, a girl who struggles with social anxiety, depression, and poor constitution. Today there are a plethora of manga telling relatable tales of introverted characters trying to navigate their way through life, but back in 2013 when we first published No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, it felt like a truly groundbreaking title that fans had been eager to read for years. Cheers to Tomoko for helping show us all the joys of slice-of-life storytelling!

If you've only seen the now-classic anime or read earlier parts of the series, this cover might be shocking - Tomoko has friends now?! What happened here?! A gradual pivot that came through the course of over 18 volumes, our beloved Tomoko grew up. No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! is slowly but surely moving towards an ending...but who knows how long that'll take. Hopefully not too soon! In the meantime, we'll cherish every story and every bit of growth and development that Tomoko goes through!

Both of these series are truly amazing - two of our favorite manga at Yen Press! Here's to ten years of these amazing stories and many more years of happy reading from the pages of No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! and Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun!