MAGNA

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

~ the obit ~

MAGNA published its first issue on 28 July 2006 and its last on 28 November 2008, one issue a month, always on the 28th. Gentosha Comics ran it, and in 2006 that was unusual enough to be the whole point: Japanese publishers had barely started putting manga on their own sites, and Gentosha was running three at once. GENZO and Spica were sold as downloads. MAGNA was free from its first issue to its last, and the banner on the front page said exactly that, monthly and free, in yellow letters the size of the logo.

The delivery is the part that dates it hardest. You downloaded the issue and read it in a viewer application, taking delivery of a file rather than opening a page. On 28 July 2008 Gentosha shipped a new viewer that worked without the download, and from the 28 September issue that was the only way to get it. Two months after that changeover, the magazine stopped.

Japanese web publishing is somewhere I read about rather than remember. In 2006 I was on Turkish hardware forums with a signature listing my components, and nothing that Gentosha put out on the 28th of a month was ever going to reach that screen. Most of what MAGNA published is now visible only through the Wayback Machine and one Wikipedia table.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was inside it ~

The lineup was broader than a free web magazine usually manages. Getter Robo Hien ran there, drawn by Naoto Tsushima from the original by Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa. So did Dual Justice, Fortune Brigade, Sukupa, and AI.com by Ark Performance, which simply stopped mid-run and never resumed.

The title with the longest afterlife was Hankyu Densha. Hiro Arikawa's linked short stories, set across eight stops of a small commuter line near Osaka, had been serialized in Gentosha's literary magazine papyrus through 2007 and collected in January 2008. The manga version, drawn by Wataru Murayama, started in MAGNA in July 2008, four months before the site closed under it.

~ where the serials went ~

Closing a web magazine in 2008 meant deciding what happened to each serial one at a time. Some were finished with new chapters written straight into their collected volumes. One moved to GENZO EX., the extra edition Gentosha had been distributing through Yahoo! Comics since 24 April 2008. The titles only about six months old went to Comic Birz, a paper magazine, which is how a web-native serial ended up on newsprint.

Hankyu Densha took that route and did not survive it. It restarted in Comic Birz with the January 2009 issue and went on hiatus after the March 2009 issue, which in practice meant cancellation. The prose original did fine without it. Toho announced a film in August 2010 and released it on 29 April 2011, where it took 1.14 billion yen on eighty screens, and the paperback passed a million copies in May 2012.

Back issues of MAGNA stayed available for a while after the last one shipped, which is more than most closed sites manage.

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