e-manga

~ the obituary ~

Kodansha started publishing manga on the web in 1997. Not scanning print pages onto a server, publishing: a paid monthly magazine that existed only online, launched under the name MORNING ONLINE after the seinen magazine whose archive fed it. Five hundred yen a month bought everything that went up that month. By the time it stopped in 2008 it had been running, on and off, for eleven years.

The early lineup leaned on reprints from Kodansha's print titles, which is what you would expect from a publisher with warehouses full of pages and a new distribution channel to fill. Work commissioned for the site itself grew year by year, and a few of those original serials went the other direction and came out as paperbacks under the KCDX imprint. Infinity Girl, drawn with Dynamic Pro, and Mikawa Beruno's Kansai Seishun Bakuhatsu Gekijou were among roughly twenty-odd titles that ran there.

I came online in 1998, on a 33.6k modem in Turkey. e-manga was already a year old by then, billed in yen, and built around a plugin that streamed animated pages. Even if the language and the payment had somehow worked out, the pipe would not have.

~ the case file ~

~ shockwave manga ~

The delivery layer was Adobe Shockwave, and Kodansha used it for what it could do rather than as a container for flat images. Panels advanced on their own timing and the illustrations animated. Some of the works carried audio as well. This was manga that played rather than manga you paged through, a decade before anybody wrote the words "motion comic" in a press release.

It is also why almost none of it can be looked at today. A JPEG from 1997 still opens. A Shockwave presentation from 1997 needs a runtime that was discontinued in 2019 and a browser that would let it load, and the archive crawlers of the era mostly caught the wrapper page rather than the content inside it.

~ the names it lived under ~

Regular publication stopped in 1999, only two years in. It came back in 2000 as a section of Web Gendai, Kodansha's general web property, and picked up the e-manga name along the way. In 2006, when the company opened MiChao!, the whole thing was absorbed into the MouRa portal and after that it updated as one corner of the MiChao! page rather than as a magazine with its own front door.

The 2008 end is not a shutdown announcement with a date on it. The serials simply stopped, one after another, until there was nothing left arriving.

~ what got buried with it ~

Every web comic platform Japan built afterward inherited the same two questions e-manga had already answered wrong and right at once: whether to charge a subscription, and whether the reading experience should imitate paper. The paid monthly model came back and won eventually, on phones. The moving panels did not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »