Godmother manga from Young Magazine US starts serialisation in November

Rin Shimokawa's Godmother is graduating from one-shot to series. Kodansha's Monthly Young Magazine announced on Tuesday that the horror manga, which ran in the publisher's English-language Young Magazine US special, will begin serialisation in the magazine's December issue on 18 November. ¹

Godmother follows Kinryu, a college student suddenly forced to drop out and move to Japan to care for a 114-year-old grandmother she did not know existed. Angry and out of options, she arrives in Yokohama to find her grandmother living behind a mahjong parlour — and is then dragged into a supernatural secret that runs down the female side of her family. ¹

The one-shot appeared in Kodansha's special Young Magazine US English issue in August 2025 as one of the entries in the magazine's reader poll. It placed second. The deal for the winners was unusually concrete: the top five titles were guaranteed serialisation on Kodansha's K MANGA app and in Monthly Young Magazine and/or YanMaga Web in Japan, with the English and Japanese chapters running at the same time. ¹²

The other winners

Godmother is not the first of that batch to make the jump. Still You has been serialising since 24 August, The Knight of Blasphemy launched on 16 July, and The Last Terran began in Monthly Young Magazine on 20 August. To Dusk and Twilight and Protocol Ryugu are also in serialisation. ¹

Two of the poll winners took a different route to print. Daisuke Itabashi's The Journey of a Dark Elf with Fading Powers started in Japan in the January 2026 issue, released in December 2025, and Seven Seas Entertainment has licensed it for an English print release beginning in March 2027. ¹

That leaves Godmother as one of the last of the five to arrive as a full series, more than a year after the one-shot introduced it to English readers.

Our opinion

The interesting story here is not the title but the pipeline. Young Magazine US was pitched as a special English edition; it has ended up working as an audition, with an English-language reader poll deciding which Japanese manga get a serialisation slot at home. That inverts the usual order, where a Japanese hit is licensed for English months or years later.

For readers, the payoff is simultaneity: a series that begins in Monthly Young Magazine can appear on K MANGA at the same time rather than trailing the Japanese release by a volume or two. The catch is that the model only works while Kodansha keeps staffing simultaneous translation and while the poll keeps surfacing titles readers actually want to follow. One second-place finish turning into a series is a good sign for the experiment. A quiet second year would not be.