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Answerman - Since When Can Publishers Other Than Viz Publish Jump Titles?

Yeah, I always wondered even back to when Gate 7 and Blood Blockade Battlefront from Jump Square were picked up by Dark Horse when other Square titles were put under the Shonen Jump label (Tegami Bachi, Blue Exorcist, Seraph of the End, etc)

Been a long time since I heard someone mention I"s. I can barely remember any details myself. Just some line about fitting the criteria of the US audience. But, sometimes an advisory sticker/logo is not something the publisher decided independently. It can be a requirement of the book buyers for stocking the title. Even if a title had warnings on it or, was rated higher did not necessarily mean the contents were in line with the Japanese edition either. I have at least one title from VIZ that was shrinkwrapped and has all kinds of warnings but, was still too much to be published uncensored in English
To my knowledge Polemon is still censored by Viz, previous Naruto volumes still are, Dragonball still is, despite the "uncut" label (which they later admitted to), and Bokurano is still censored despite it being labeled "mature".

Ok yes I was being sarcastic. But parts of the west outside of the US, or outside of the Anglosphere, seem ok with it:
https://www.amazon.de/Love-Ru-Darkness-Blu-ray/dp/B0791XV7KB/
https://www.amazon.de/Testament-Sister-Devil-Departures-Blu-ray/dp/B07CXBXMKJ/
To Love Ru Darkness and The Testament of Sister New Devil Departures (OVA) are rated age 16 in Germany and so are not adult-restricted. This coincidentally is in line with Seven Seas' older teen rating for their ecchi titles

Wait what they censored a Seinen manga, for who ??? and in the did it in the 2010s no less, are the people at Viz [expletive] drunk ?? how are the original publishers allowing a dumb American company to censor their manga.

To my knowledge Polemon is still censored by Viz, previous Naruto volumes still are, Dragonball still is, despite the "uncut" label (which they later admitted to), and Bokurano is still censored despite it being labeled "mature".

Wait what they censored a Seinen manga, for who ??? and in the did it in the 2010s no less, are the people at Viz [expletive] drunk ?? how are the original publishers allowing a dumb American company to censor their manga.

Even recently, they censored and completely cut a page from Robo x Laserbeam. It really amazes me 10+ years later they still continue this nonsense.

I am not a fan of censorship, as are many people. For more seinen-type (not demographics but content wise), leave it uncensored but put those "parental warning"-type shrink wraps around a volume.

The article really doesn't posit any answers to the biggest question that jumped out at me from the submission: "Why might Viz, which had right of first refusal, have turned down Silver Spoon, a popular manga from the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist"? (And Yen Press's license took quite a while too, six years into the series and three years after the end of the anime.)

One theory I have is another branding issue; "agricultural high school" isn't skeevy like the Jump titles mentioned, but could still be hard to figure out how to sell. The other is license price. And of course, it could well have been a mixture of both.

Yeah, I had questions about how Yen Press got Silver Spoon rather than Viz. Not that I'm complaining, since it's finally getting released of course.

Looks like the whole rumor of Viz Media being the only North American manga publisher with access to Shueisha and Shogakukan titles is entirely false. That's good.

As for Seven Seas licensing To Love Ru andYuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs, another factor comes into play: a given manga also has to make sense for their overall brand and be a good fit for their line-up of titles. While VIZ may publish some titles that have “mature” content with violent action or horror scenes (see Terra Formars or Junji Ito's manga), or Boys Love manga (for example, BL manga on their SuBLime Manga imprint) they tend to shy away from outright ecchi / sexually explicit content, especially on imprints such as Shonen Jump and Shonen Sunday. that have been built up a reputation with readers, librarians, booksellers and comic shops as having primarily teen-friendly content.

@R. Kasahara

Years ago, I read where Viz (possibly Trish Ladoux) stated that they left out what they called the "Ronin Arc" of Maison Ikkoku because they thought their audience could not relate to the idea of having to test into college or for that matter having to scrabble so hard to make it into any college. Apparently since this arc came almost immediately after the introductory chapters that they thought it would kill the series before it got well started.

At any rate this was included when they published the second edition of the series, much as Dark Horse restored the missing Oh My Goddess! chapters when they reprinted the series unflipped.