月刊コミックラッシュ

» see comic-rush.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

450 yen a month, billed through a Japanese card or a Japanese points wallet, with a viewer that wanted Flash on the desktop and iOS 3.2 on the phone. That was the door to コミックラッシュ after it left paper in 2011, and from Ankara it was a door with no handle on my side. What I can read is the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is unusual enough to be worth writing down.

JIVE Ltd. was set up in January 2004 as a publishing arm of Takara, the toy company, and 月刊コミックラッシュ was its magazine. The first issue went on sale on 26 January 2004 and it ran monthly, with collected volumes appearing as CR COMICS on the seventh of each month. Japanese publishing had entered what the trade called the manga magazine launch rush of 2004 to 2006, and this was the one that went first. The early lineup leaned on characters the parent company already owned, which is how a magazine ends up serializing Ragnarok Online and Galaxy Angel next to original work. Takara Tomy sold the whole company to Poplar in April 2006 and the paper stock got better. After that the original serials started producing anime of their own, beginning with Tonagura! the same year.

The last printed issue was the March 2011 number, on sale 26 January 2011. From 1 March the magazine reappeared as a paid website and an ebook, same name, same monthly schedule, no paper at all. Free web manga magazines already existed in Japan by then. A commercial magazine picking itself up off the newsstand and putting the whole thing behind a web paywall did not, and コミックラッシュ is generally credited as the first to do it.

~ the record ~

~ the first one to do it ~

The subscription was strange in a way that tells you nobody had done this before. The monthly plan renewed automatically on the first and gave you the newest issue only. Back numbers were not included and the site said so in plain language, which meant a subscriber who missed a month had missed it the way you miss a magazine on a shelf rather than the way you miss a file. Fifty bonus points landed the working day after you signed up, spendable on the individual volumes the site also sold.

Everything else was 2011 Japanese web commerce as practiced. Rakuten's payment service and NetMile turned up as options in August. An Android app shipped in March. There was even an English edition, opened on 31 May, which put two titles into English and then stopped. The footer asked you to view the site in Internet Explorer 7 or later, or in Firefox 3 or later, which was already a slightly wistful request by 2014.

~ the day it died ~

By the July 2012 issue the serial list was down to two: the second part of ゴッドバード by Hiroyuki Hasegawa, and ヘタレ姉。 by Akito Haruka. A magazine with two serials is not a magazine, it is a schedule being honored.

On 1 March 2014 the site posted two items on the same day. One announced the April issue. The other announced the end of the service. ゴッドバード finished inside that April issue, and the titles that had been on hiatus simply never came back. Everything shut on 31 March 2014. Member points were not refunded, and the archived front page from that last morning still lists the closure notice above the new-issue notice, in that order.

The works moved to eBookJapan and stayed readable. The publisher did not do as well: JIVE was split in 2019, the remainder renamed JIVE Next and absorbed into Poplar in January 2020, the surviving half sold to Media Do, the book business handed to Everystar in 2024, and the liquidation finished in March 2026. The domain outlived all of it. comic-rush.jp answers today with a WordPress review blog about manga adaptations, run by somebody else entirely, carrying the dead magazine's name.

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