幻蔵 (GENZO)

» see gentosha-comics.net/genzo/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Gentosha Comics distributed the first issue of 幻蔵 on Monday 29 November 2004, a day late because the 28th fell on a Sunday, and every issue after that on the 28th. It was a seinen magazine that existed only as a file. There was no print edition at any point and there was no free tier: you paid, and the subscription covered 幻蔵 together with スピカ, the josei magazine running beside it on the same site.

That site was called WebコミックGENZO and it was one of the earliest things of its kind anywhere. At the end of 2004 almost no Japanese publisher was running a manga magazine on its own servers, and by the middle of 2006 Gentosha was running three: the two paid ones and MAGNA, which was free from its first issue to its last.

Reading any of it required a browser plugin called Crochet. On Internet Explorer the install started by itself. On anything else, Macs included, you went and fetched it yourself. Purchases were handled by Voyager Store, and the front page carried a permanent notice asking people to type their email address correctly, because getting it wrong meant the license mail never arrived and the issue you had already bought would not open.

In 2004 I was at university in Ankara, and paying every month for a comic that needed a plugin and an emailed key to open would have read to me as an argument against paying. This one is a record rather than a memory. A paid monthly manga subscription in 2004 arrived roughly a decade before the market that would eventually pay for it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the mobile edition ~

From June 2006 the magazines went onto phones as GENZO/幻冬舎コミックス, live on Vodafone from the 1st and on au from the 22nd. The pricing was the standard Japanese carrier-site shape: 315 yen a month for 300 points, or 525 yen for 600, with the newest 幻蔵 and スピカ chapters readable for 200 of them. You could subscribe to both tiers at once, which tells you what the heavy readers were doing. The compatible handset list ran to nine Vodafone models and whatever au was shipping with BREW, and access went through the carrier's own menu tree, four levels down, under electronic books.

~ the english edition ~

There was an English GENZO, and it was not a licensing deal arranged years after the fact. In June 2006 the site's own news column records the English version shipping its July issue, on the same monthly cycle as the Japanese one. Gravitation EX, Maki Murakami's sequel to Gravitation, ran on the GENZO site in both languages until it went on hiatus after the November 2006 issue.

Same-month Japanese and English release of a serialized manga chapter was not a normal thing in 2006. It became normal about a decade later under names like simulpub, and by then Gentosha had stopped doing it.

~ the name outlived the magazine ~

With the December 2008 issue, 幻蔵 was merged into スピカ, which by then published as Webスピカ. Eight serials transferred across, among them QUO VADIS by Kayono Saeki working from a Kaoru Shintani original, and 姫武将政宗 ぼんたん!! by Kineko Abekawa. One title went the other direction: デザート・ライオット left for Comic Birz and came out on paper.

The site never renamed itself. A year after the merger the address was still gentosha-comics.net/genzo/, the header still read WebコミックGENZO, and every line in the news column was about Webスピカ: the December issue distributed on 27 November 2009, the January issue due on the 28th. 幻蔵 had been gone for a year and its name was still on the front door.

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