FlexComixブラッド (FlexComix Blood)

» see flex-comix.jp/blood as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

月刊少年ブラッド, Monthly Shonen Blood, lasted seven issues. SoftBank Creative started it in April 2006 and stopped it in October, and it had an official website attached called Web★ブラッド that was doing the ordinary job of a magazine's web presence. When the print magazine died the serials did not. On 16 January 2007 most of them opened again as a free web comic site, this time hosted inside Yahoo! JAPAN's comics section, under the name FlexComixブラッド.

The schedule at the start was loose to the point of being no schedule. Chapters went up per title, on weekdays, whenever they were ready, so a given series might appear once a month or twice and you found out by checking. From June 2008 the whole site moved to Wednesdays and every title standardized on one chapter a month, which is a magazine's rhythm reconstructed on a website that had been trying to avoid having one.

Reading cost nothing and required no account. Back issues worked on a sliding window: the first chapter of anything stayed up indefinitely, and from the second chapter onward you could reach the last two. Print collections came out on the FlexComix label through Holp Shuppan, shared with the sibling site FlexComixネクスト, so the free site was the front end and the tankobon was the business.

~ the case file ~

~ Internet Explorer only ~

You could not read it in a browser of your choosing. FlexComix Blood served its pages through a dedicated viewer that supported Internet Explorer and nothing else, and that viewer installed itself automatically the first time you opened a chapter. In 2007 that was defensible and by 2011 it was an obstacle, and the site never stopped doing it.

This is the part I recognize. I was already on Firefox by then, running a browser that would not have loaded the thing, and I had spent enough of the decade dealing with sites that assumed one rendering engine to know exactly how that conversation goes internally. Somebody built a viewer against the browser that had ninety percent of the market, shipped it, and then the market moved and the rewrite never got budgeted. Japanese comic sites were unusually committed to this pattern, and the ones that avoided it advertised the fact.

~ what it was carrying ~

The catalog was better than the delivery. ブレイク ブレイド by Yunosuke Yoshinaga came over from the print magazine and became the site's biggest property, a mecha war story that got six animated films across 2010 and 2011 while the chapters were still going up on a Wednesday for free. にゃんこい! by Sato Fujiwara got a television anime in 2009 and ヒャッコ by Haruaki Kato got one in 2008.

Underneath the adaptations was the usual web-magazine mix: 神曲奏界ポリフォニカ spin-offs, a Nyaruko-san four-panel strip, a tie-in comic for the online game Emil Chronicle Online, and dozens of series that never left the site. Two sibling magazines split off from it, フレア for shojo and ネクスト for seinen, both seeded with titles moved out of Blood.

~ the merge ~

In 2012 FlexComix passed under the control of Gaia Holdings, and the new owner already had a comics operation. Blood and its seinen sibling Next were both marked for absorption into COMIC メテオ, run by G-mode, another Gaia company. The handover ran over three months rather than happening on a day. Two titles moved across in August. September was a transition period where some series published in both places at once and others had only their back numbers on Meteor. From October there was one site.

The last thing FlexComix Blood served was a notice about its own ending, and it is a cheerful one. The front page key visual became a 997 pixel banner with the Blood and Next wordmarks side by side, a fat red arrow pointing down at COMIC メテオ, the words 合体しました across the top, and a manga girl in a peaked cap leaning in from the right to tell you that you could reach the new site from a computer or a phone. In the corner, in small type, 毎週水曜日更新: the destination updates on Wednesdays, same day the old one did.

~ what got buried with it ~

COMIC Meteor is still publishing in 2026, now served under the kirapo.jp domain, which means the destination outlived the thing that was moved into it by fourteen years and counting. The titles that mattered went with it and kept running.

What did not survive is the reading experience, and specifically the viewer. Every chapter that site ever served went through a Windows-only plugin that no longer exists on any machine anybody owns, and the free archive it fronted has no route back. The comics are fine. They are in print, or they are on Meteor. The website is unreachable in a more complete sense than most: flex-comix.jp does not resolve at all, and even the captures that exist are pages wrapped around a viewer that will not start.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »