Dengeki hp

~ the goodbye ~

Dengeki hp was a Japanese-language light novel magazine, sold in Japanese bookshops and never translated into anything. Whatever reached me out of it arrived years late and in another medium, as anime with subtitles, carrying no label saying where it had started. Everything below is paper trail.

MediaWorks put the first volume out on 18 December 1998. It came quarterly for the first eight, then every two months from Volume 9, priced at 945 yen or 720 yen depending on how thick the issue ran. The contributors were largely the authors already writing for Dengeki Bunko, the publisher's light novel imprint, which tells you what the magazine was for.

It ran a short story prize under its own name, the Dengeki hp Short Story Prize, and it put out a twice-yearly companion called Dengeki hp SPECIAL as a supplement to the monthly Comic Dengeki Daioh. Volume 38 got a redesign. Fifty volumes in all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the books came second ~

The thing worth knowing about Dengeki hp is the order of operations. It ran work ahead of publication rather than after it, frequently printing close to a full volume's worth of a novel before that novel reached the shops, so the magazine was where a Dengeki Bunko title got tried on readers first and bound afterward.

Keiichi Sigsawa's Kino's Journey went through it that way. So did Shakugan no Shana, Toradora!, Ballad of a Shinigami, Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan and Inukami!, which between them account for a decent slice of the anime that reached the English-speaking internet over the following decade. Most of those had been animated before the magazine folded. The adaptations are the only way any of it got to me, and none of them came with a note about which magazine had printed the thing first.

~ the staff moved two months later ~

The announcement ran inside Volume 50 itself, on sale 10 October 2007. Japanese publishing has a specific word for this and the article uses it: 休刊, a suspension rather than a termination, with 事実上 in front of it to mean that in practice it is the end. The distinction matters commercially and means nothing to a reader.

Dengeki Bunko Magazine went on sale on 10 December 2007, two months after, with the same editorial staff carried across. Neither encyclopedia gives a reason for the change, and the shape of it does not suggest a dramatic one. Nobody records what the hp in the title stood for either.

MediaWorks was merged into ASCII Media Works the following year, so the publisher on the spine of those fifty volumes stopped existing under that name too. The Dengeki imprint is still trading today. Dengeki Bunko Magazine ran in print until April 2020 and then stopped, and Kadokawa announced that one the same way, saying it would be back.

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