Futabasha Web Magazine

» see futabasha.co.jp/wm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Futabasha never built a destination for this. Futabasha Web Magazine lived inside the company's own corporate website, at futabasha.co.jp/wm, on the same domain as the catalog and the press releases. You clicked through from the publisher's front page and you were reading a comic. There was no account to make and nothing to install, which in the Japanese web manga market of the 2000s made it the odd one out.

It ran from 2001 and it carried more than comics. There were novels, essays, hobby and practical columns, and an adult section behind an age gate that eventually became its own site. Delivery was either a plugin-free viewer or a PDF. Finished serials mostly stayed readable after they ended, instead of being pulled the day the last chapter went up.

The names on it were not filler. Jiro Taniguchi published the fourth chapter of Seton here from November 2006 before it moved on to Futabasha's web Manga Action in April 2007. Hisaichi Ishii, Shungicu Uchida, Risa Ito and Koji Aihara all had work running at one point or another. This was a working magazine that happened to have no paper.

Japanese web manga was never going to reach me directly. I cannot read it, and the window in which a Turkish reader encountered manga at all was the scanlation window, on English-language aggregators that were mostly illegal. A publisher quietly giving its own comics away in Japanese, on its own domain, for twenty-one years, is a thing I only found by going looking for what had died.

~ the case file ~

~ the april 2013 emptying ~

On 10 April 2013 Futabasha consolidated its web comics. WEB Comic High! and Otome High! were folded into the serialization page of Manga Action's official site, the result was renamed WEB Comic Action, and the general-audience titles from Futabasha Web Magazine moved across in the same operation. Several catalogs of Japanese web comic sites now record this one as having run from 2001 to 2013 because of that move.

Those catalogs are wrong by nine years. The site kept a lineup of its own and kept publishing it. Hisaichi Ishii's Donut Box, Shungicu Uchida's Ondanbatake, Odawara Dragon's Sweet Pea and a Chinese-language teaching strip by Meiko Komichi were all still running at the end. The adult arm, which had opened as a separate site in 2009, went over to the Action Pizazz official site in 2014, and that one really did stop then.

~ 7 july ~

The last update went up on 7 July 2022. The notice on the front page said the magazine would end publication of its works at the end of August, and it did. Twenty-one years of archive, most of it still readable right up to that point, came down over the following weeks.

What is left is the front page. futabasha.co.jp/wm still answers in 2026, laid out the way it always was, with the closure notice sitting where the new-arrivals list used to be and one book promoted underneath it: a collected volume retitled from The Day My Wife Was Arrested to If Only I Could Kill Her With These Hands, on sale 27 July. That is the last thing Futabasha Web Magazine ever advertised, and it has been advertising it for four years.

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