Inkblazers

» see inkblazers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Inkblazers opened and closed inside four years while I was in my early thirties reading no comics at all, so this is reconstruction rather than memory. It belongs here anyway, because of what it was trying to do rather than what it managed to do.

Victor Chu and Bancha Dhammarungruang started it in 2011 under the name MangaMagazine.net, with offices in Boston and in Bangkok and a million dollars of seed money behind it. The pitch was original English-language manga and comics by people who were not being published anywhere else. Somewhere in 2014 it renamed itself Inkblazers.

The terms are the interesting part. Hosting was free. Artists did not sign away rights to their work, which in comics publishing was not the normal deal. Money came back to them through paid subscriptions and merchandise sales, with ad revenue on top, and Chu described the company as a technology layer under other people's comics rather than a publisher with a catalog of its own.

~ the record ~

~ what it paid for ~

The company called its approach crowdsourcing, which in 2013 meant something more specific than it does now. Fans supported individual authors directly, and the platform read what the fans did as data about which titles to push and which rights to go after. Gathering a lot of small titles into one place was supposed to sell more than any of them could sell alone.

That last assumption is the one that failed. The userbase was loyal and it was small, and a small loyal audience pays for a hobby, not for two offices and a payroll. Nothing about the model was dishonest or badly built. It simply needed more people than it ever found.

~ the day it died ~

Inkblazers shut on 1 February 2015. The stated reason was that the creators could no longer financially support the continuation of the site, which is a plainer sentence than most shutdown notices manage. It still caught people off guard. Artists who had spent three years building a readership there had to find somewhere else to put their work on short notice.

Most of them went to Tapastic, which opened its own community forum to the arrivals and asked its regulars to make room. That is a decent thing for a competitor to do, and it is also exactly what a competitor does when a rival dies with an audience still attached to it.

~ what is at the old address ~

inkblazers.com still resolves in 2026. It answers with a redirect to a staging host belonging to a Brazilian hospital group, which is what happens when a lapsed domain gets picked up and pointed at whichever server was convenient. There is nothing about comics behind it.

The old name did better. mangamagazine.net loads the front page it was serving in 2014, analytics tags and all, with a copyright line reading Social Octopus Inc. Click anything on it and you get a 404, because only that one file survived. The site that got renamed is still standing and the site it was renamed into is gone.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »