Comic Gumbo

~ the eulogy ~

To get a copy you had to be standing outside a Tokyo-area train station on a Tuesday morning, where somebody in a yellow jacket would put one in your hand. That is about as far from a 2007 Ankara commute as a magazine can get, and the distance is the whole reason Comic Gumbo is interesting: it was a web business that had decided its distribution channel was people.

It launched on 16 January 2007, published by Digima of Chiyoda ward in Tokyo, billed as the world's first free weekly manga magazine. Every issue came out on a Tuesday. The target reader was a man between twenty and forty commuting into central Tokyo, and the editor-in-chief was Digima's own president, Akihiko Kai, who said in an interview that he had built the whole business model with no experience as an editor and no contacts in publishing.

The revenue plan was the odd part. The website and the mobile site let anybody read the last two weeks free, and five hundred yen a month bought access to every back number. Because that subscription income existed, the magazine carried noticeably fewer ad pages than a comparable free paper or a newsstand title. The same serials also went out as web comics inside Yahoo! Comics, and from October 2007 there was a paperback line, Gumbo Comics, sold through normal bookshops at a normal price.

~ the dossier ~

~ the yellow jackets ~

The street operation ran on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, twice a day, starting at 7:30 in the morning and again at 4:30 in the afternoon, at major stations across Tokyo and Kanagawa and out into Saitama and Chiba. Which day and which hour depended on the station. Alongside that, racks went into shops, and the rack channel kept growing until it was the main one by the end. Placements reached stores in nine prefectures outside the capital region, as far north as Iwate and as far southwest as Oita.

Printing a hundred thousand copies of a weekly and physically handing them to commuters is an expensive way to acquire a reader who might then pay you five hundred yen a month. From August 2007 Digima could not raise any more capital against those distribution costs, and the cash position deteriorated from there. November's print run was cut in half to fifty thousand. From issue 45 on 20 November the handout points were pruned and the plan shifted to racks and direct delivery.

~ what was in it ~

About half the lineup ran in alternate issues rather than every week, which is how a weekly with a small staff fills forty-eight numbers. The launch issue opened with a reprint of Motoka Murakami's mountaineering series as a special, and the regular roster had Tatsuya Egawa drawing an adaptation of Soseki's Botchan under the title BOCCHAN. There was an autobiographical manga about the rakugo performer Kikuo Hayashiya, and Kotobuki Shiriagari was adapting a long-running Nissan radio drama.

When the magazine folded every serial was cut off mid-run, but a few of them found homes. Yokoshiman's パート怪人 悪キューレ went to Asahi Shimbun Publishing in two volumes. 足立淳's 人間噂八百 and Tomokichi Hidaka's トーキョー博物誌 both went to Sankei Shimbun Publishing, which collected the Gumbo run plus chapters that had never been printed.

~ the funny part ~

In October 2007, with the funding already gone, Digima launched a sister free paper. COMIC AKiBAna! handed out an issue numbered 00 in Akihabara on the 20th and 21st, cover by Mine Yoshizaki of Sgt. Frog, with a tie-in campaign from Gungho Games. Afterward the official site said the project was moving below the surface. Issue 1 never appeared.

Digima had Transcosmos and Nippon TV on the shareholder register, which makes the ending read stranger. Issue 48 shipped on 11 December 2007 to racks and subscribers only, with no street handout at all, and the company suspended business the same day, a fact that became public the following morning. Teikoku Databank recorded liabilities of two hundred million yen and the wind-down handed to four lawyers. By the account of 足立淳, one of the serialized artists, who had also blogged about the magazine ordering rewrites of finished pages, the plan by year end was voluntary bankruptcy.

The website and the mobile site stopped working entirely on 25 December with no announcement. Yahoo! Comics carried the titles for three days more and ended distribution of all of them on 28 December 2007.

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