Dengeki Comic Gao!

~ the eulogy ~

Monthly Dengeki Comic Gao! went on sale on the twenty-seventh of every month from December 1992, when the February 1993 issue appeared, until February 2008. MediaWorks published it, and for the first year the title was set in Latin capitals as GAO!, which is a childish rendering of a growl. It was a shōnen manga monthly whose actual subject was pretty girls, and whose actual job inside the company was converting prose into pictures.

It did not start from nothing. MediaWorks was brand new in 1992 and most of the early serials in Gao! were the same series that had been running in Kadokawa Shoten's Monthly Comic Comp, carried across with their titles lightly altered or restarted as a second part. Readers of Comic Comp followed the work, and Comic Comp itself folded in October 1994, under two years after the magazine that had drained it launched. The distribution line closes the circle: Shufunotomo handled it at launch, Kadokawa Shoten from 1999, and Kadokawa Group Publishing from 2007 to the end. The magazine that opened by emptying a Kadokawa title spent its last nine years being shipped by Kadokawa.

Then Dengeki Bunko started in June 1993 and the magazine found its permanent shape. The light novel imprint wrote the stories and Gao! drew them, after which the anime studios took over. Pita-Ten and DearS ran in it, and so did the manga adaptations of Toradora! and Gurren Lagann. Almost none of it was original to the magazine in the sense a manga weekly would mean, and the company had built it that way on purpose.

The problem arrived from inside. MediaWorks launched Monthly Comic Dengeki Daioh as a sister title, and Daioh steadily outgrew Gao! in both recognition and print run. From around 2004 other publishers started launching their own media-mix manga magazines and the share kept thinning. The February 2007 issue came with a full redesign and the old Latin-letter spelling brought back on the cover, now lowercase. Circulation did not come back with it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pipeline ~

The structure Gao! sat in is how a Japanese publisher of that period turned a paperback into a franchise without anyone outside the building seeing a plan. A Dengeki Bunko novel went out to readers who had read nothing else by that author, and if it moved, a manga version started in Gao! under a different artist. The anime option came last, after two sets of sales figures had already come in.

Which means the credit lines read strangely if you are used to manga as an author's medium. Toradora! in Gao! is drawn by Zekkyou from Takemiya Yuyuko's novels. Gurren Lagann is drawn by Mori Kotarou from GAINAX's series. The artist's name comes second on the page in both cases, after the rights holder, and the monthly chapter is there to keep somebody else's property in front of readers.

A cover from the middle of the run makes the whole machine visible at once. Inukami! takes the front, flagged as currently airing on television, with a free Inukami! clear file bound into the issue as the month's supplement and a DearS body pillow advertised in the mail-order pages. Every item on that cover points back at the same Dengeki Bunko shelf.

There was a side door as well. comic SYLPH launched on 9 December 2006 as a quarterly special edition of Gao!, aimed at a female readership the parent title was not reaching. On 21 March 2008, three weeks after Gao! stopped, its sixth volume appeared as a special edition of Dengeki Daioh instead, and from the 22 May 2008 issue it dropped the prefix, went bimonthly and became Sylph in its own right. It went monthly in May 2010 and ran until the September 2017 issue, on sale 22 July, with some of its serials moving to a pixiv imprint opened two days before that. Nine years and five months of it, against Gao!'s fifteen.

~ gao! the final!! ~

The last issue is dated April 2008 and went on sale on 27 February, the usual day, with the cover nickname Gao! The Final!!. Most of the serials ended in it. Seven of them resumed in Dengeki Daioh the following month, one went to Wani Books' Comic Gum, and the Japanese Wikipedia summary calls the result an absorption by Daioh in all but name. Fifteen years from launch, or twenty if you count back through the Comic Comptiq and Comic Comp line the magazine had inherited its readers from.

The output of this magazine reached Turkey and the magazine never did. Gurren Lagann and Toradora! had an audience here, arriving over broadband as fansubs rather than through any licensed route, while the printed monthly that carried their comic versions was not sold in any shop in the country and would not have been readable if it had been. Everything that came out of this building reached me as animation, with the paper stage of it invisible.

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