Dengeki Comic Japan

» see comicjapan.dengeki.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ASCII Media Works ran a preview issue on 15 October 2010 and launched Dengeki Comic Japan properly on 24 December that year. It was a monthly, out on the 25th, and the banner across the top of the site called it a new-century electronic comic magazine you could read on a smartphone, an iPad, an iPhone or a PC. That list of four devices is the whole pitch of 2010 digital publishing compressed into one line of red text.

The part that still looks strange is the price. Every issue was free to read, and so was every back issue, permanently. A Japanese comic publisher in 2010 charging nothing for two years of archive was making a bet about attention rather than about sales, and the bet was that the collected volumes would pay for the magazine.

They built that side out too. In September 2011 the imprint Dengeki Japan Comics launched to publish the serials in book form, aimed deliberately at an older readership than the regular Dengeki Comics line, with DJC on the spine and a base price of 599 yen. The imprint outlived the magazine by more than a year and only stopped in 2014, when the other title feeding it ceased publication.

It did not work long enough. The February 2013 issue went out on 25 December 2012 and was the last one. Several series finished in that issue. Three moved to other ASCII Media Works or Kadokawa titles and kept running elsewhere. The Japanese Wikipedia entry records the closure without recording a reason, and no reason has surfaced since.

~ the record ~

~ where you actually read it ~

A free web magazine in 2010 still had to be delivered through somebody's store, and the list of places Dengeki Comic Japan could be read is a small map of the Japanese digital ecosystem at the time: BOOK Walker, Voyager Store, Zasshi Online, the Android Market, Niconico Seiga, GREE, the App Store and honto. Eight distribution points for one free magazine.

That is the cost of the era. Nobody could just publish and be read, because reading happened inside apps, and each app meant its own negotiation and its own build. All of that overhead sat on a magazine that was charging nobody anything.

~ miss bernard ~

The title that outlived the magazine is Bernard-jou Iwaku by Yuuki Shikawa, published in English as Miss Bernard said. It ran here from the February 2012 issue, delivered on 22 December 2011, through to the final issue. The joke is a girl named Sawako Machida who wants the reputation of a reader without doing any reading, surrounded by friends who have genuinely read the books and will not let her get away with it. The material is whatever came up that week, The Tale of the Heike one time and Fermat's Last Theorem the next.

When Dengeki Comic Japan closed, the strip moved publishers entirely. Ichijinsha ran a one-off in the May 2013 issue of Monthly Comic REX and restarted the serialization from the January 2014 issue. In 2014 it won the short-work prize at the eighteenth Tezuka Osamu Cultural Awards. A short-form television anime aired from October 2016 with Eri Kitamura in the title role, and by December 2023 the collected volumes had passed half a million copies.

So the magazine's best asset walked out the door into print and kept growing there for another decade. That is the ordinary shape of a manga career and a peculiar thing to read as an obituary: the host publication is the part that died.

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