Shihei Lin, the former Shueisha editor who shepherded Chainsaw Man, Spy x Family and Dandadan, has opened manuscript submissions for Mix Green, his new independent manga platform.
Shihei Lin, the former Shueisha editor credited with building Chainsaw Man, Spy x Family and Dandadan into global hits, has opened manuscript submissions for Mix Green, an independent editorial company and manga platform he founded after leaving the publisher. Submissions went live on Friday, marking the first concrete step for a venture that has been watched closely since Lin's Shueisha exit.
Lin spent years at Shueisha's Shonen Jump division, where he worked directly with Tatsuki Fujimoto on Chainsaw Man, with Tatsuya Endo on Spy x Family, and with Yukinobu Tatsu on Dandadan. That trio of titles defined a new generation of Jump breakouts, and Lin's name became an unusually public one for a manga editor, with creators repeatedly crediting him in afterwords and interviews.
Mix Green positions itself as an editorial company rather than a traditional publisher. The announcement frames the platform as a space for creators to work with experienced editors outside the constraints of a magazine masthead, with Lin personally leading the editorial direction. Manuscript submissions are open to artists regardless of prior publication history.
The platform is accepting original manga submissions through its website, with Lin and his team reviewing work for serialisation on the Mix Green platform itself. The model leans on direct-to-reader publishing rather than licensing serialisation slots to an existing magazine, a structural break from the Jump pipeline Lin came up through.
Details released with the launch emphasise editorial partnership as the core pitch. Rather than competing on scale with Shueisha's Shonen Jump Plus or Kodansha's digital arms, Mix Green is betting that a small roster guided hands-on by a proven hit-maker can attract the next wave of ambitious newcomers. Lin has publicly stated that he wants to work with artists who have stories only they can tell, echoing the curatorial approach that defined his Jump tenure.
Independent manga platforms have multiplied over the past few years, but few have launched with this level of name recognition attached to a single editor. The Japanese manga business has historically concentrated talent discovery inside the major publishers, where editors function as part of a large institutional machine. A standalone editorial company built around one editor's track record is a rarer proposition, and a test of how portable an editor's reputation actually is once separated from a publisher's distribution muscle.
For aspiring mangaka, the practical appeal is access. Breaking into a Shueisha magazine typically means cycling through rookie contests and pitch meetings with assigned editors. Mix Green's open submissions route promises a more direct path to the kind of hands-on editor Lin is known to be, without the gatekeeping layers of a traditional publisher.
The first Mix Green serialisations and the artists Lin signs will be the real signal of whether the platform can replicate, even on a smaller scale, the pipeline that produced his Jump hits. No launch lineup has been announced alongside the submissions opening, and Lin has not disclosed financial backers or platform revenue terms publicly. Readers in India and elsewhere can expect any eventual licensed translations to follow whichever distribution partners Mix Green eventually works with, though no English-language rollout has been confirmed.
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