Club Sunday

» see club.shogakukan.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

By 2008 the manga that reached Turkey reached it through scanlation sites, in English, uploaded by people with no relationship to whoever had published it. Club Sunday was the opposite arrangement, a publisher putting its own comics online in Japanese for readers in Japan, and I was not in that audience.

It opened on Christmas Eve 2008 under a different name, Soku-yomi Sunday, built as an anniversary project: Weekly Shonen Sunday was turning fifty and Shogakukan wanted something to mark it. The claim the site could make, and did, was that no weekly shonen magazine had run a webcomic distribution site before. The launch catalog was two series, GOLDEN★AGE by Kazuyuki Samukawa and Hyde and Closer by Haro Aso, both of them continuations of runs that had already finished in the paper magazine.

On 25 March 2009 it took on original work, pulled in titles running in Weekly Shonen Sunday Chou, and changed its name to Club Sunday. Readers shortened that to Kurasan almost immediately. Updates came out twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays, with different series on different days, and the serials moved at a monthly pace rather than a weekly one.

~ the case file ~

~ how it read ~

Pages were served through DOR, the Digital Object Reader, which is to say the comics arrived inside a viewer rather than as images you could right-click. That was the standard publisher answer in 2008 to the question of how to put a manga page on the web without putting the manga page on the web.

~ the free experiment ~

The plan on day one was that the free period would be temporary. No account was needed at launch, and registration was scheduled to become mandatory from May 2009. It never did. The site's own record of this is one sentence long and says the registration system was abolished because the thing had gone over well without it, which is a publisher looking at its numbers and deciding not to put a door in front of them.

There was also a feature called This Week's Sunday, which took one serial from the issue of Weekly Shonen Sunday on sale that same week and put it up on the site. It ran until 12 July 2016. The last series to go through it was Komi Can't Communicate, which was six months old at the time and went on to sell in the millions.

~ the handover ~

Sunday Webry launched on 13 July 2016. Eight days later the Weekly Shonen Sunday editorial department announced that Club Sunday would stop publishing at the end of August, which gave the site five weeks of knowing.

The titles were distributed rather than retired. Pokemon Adventures: Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire moved across to Sunday Webry along with Harmagedon Rebirth, and a third, a series about letters written to your sixteen-year-old self, went with them. Ichiba Kurogane wa Kasegitai was sent somewhere else entirely, to MangaONE and Ura Sunday. On 31 August 2016 the site stopped, on the date it had announced, with everything worth keeping already moved.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »