What is Attack on Titan: Junior High?

Attack on Titan: Junior High (Shingeki! Kyojin Chūgakkō) is Saki Nakagawa’s comedy manga, serialized in Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine alongside its grim parent from 2012: 11 volumes, April 2013 to August 2016, gathered in English by Kodansha USA in five omnibus books. The premise is a single demotion of scale: Titans are the neighbouring school’s giants who steal students’ lunches, Eren’s hatred burns undimmed at cafeteria stakes, and the Survey Corps is an after-school club.

It earned the full franchise treatment anyway: a television anime in 2015 and an extra “High School” volume in 2018. Junior High matters to this shelf because it is the sanctioned version of a joke the author himself was telling in the back of his own books (School Castes), and because its long, successful run in the same magazine as the original proves how completely the cast, by 2012, already belonged to the readers as people rather than as plot.