MangaX

» see mangax.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

MangaX was a free original manga site run out of Shinjuku by a small company called 株式会社MAGIA. Every chapter of everything was free, on desktop and on phones, with an account only if you wanted one. The slogan was 最高のMANGA体験をあなたへ, the best manga experience delivered to you, and the catalog that eventually got recorded on the Japanese Wikipedia runs to 27 series spanning hard science fiction at one end and BL at the other.

The unusual part was the direction the comics traveled. Japanese manga sites export. MangaX imported, licensing series out of China and Korea and running them in Japanese for Japanese readers. 雛蜂 by 白猫sunny and 鎮魂街 by 許辰 were both Chinese webcomics, and MangaX is how a Japanese audience met them. For a brief period a Shinjuku startup was the route by which Chinese comics reached the country that invented the form.

MAGIA walked away rather than collapsed. An app version of MangaX shipped on 22 September 2017. Five months later MAGIA put a different app into beta, a BL manga reader called BLue Star, and launched it properly on 18 June 2018. After that the company's news feed is about books and apps that are not MangaX, until the morning of 8 April 2019.

~ the record ~

~ ten minutes apart ~

MAGIA's last two announcements are timestamped in the RSS feed the Internet Archive happened to capture that September. At 05:14:27 UTC on 8 April 2019, the company reported that 鎮魂街 had reached volume two in Japanese bookshops. At 05:24:53 UTC, ten minutes and twenty-six seconds later, it announced that MangaX was closing. Somebody sat down, wrote the good news about a comic, published it, and then published the death of the website that had been serializing that comic in Japanese for three years.

~ the comics it imported ~

The volume two post is unusually detailed for a thing posted ten minutes before a funeral. 鎮魂街 went on sale on 22 March 2019 through Leed Publishing, B6 format, 168 pages, 760 yen before tax, running in the magazine コミック乱ツインズ. MAGIA described it as a web comic that had done four billion page views worldwide, which is a figure about the Chinese original and not about MangaX, and the distinction matters: the site was never big, the comic was.

That is also why the ending is less sad than it reads. The series MangaX brought into Japanese did not die with it. 鎮魂街 kept going into print volumes and an anime, and 雛蜂 had already been on Kindle since 2017. The import pipeline worked. The free website at the front of it was the part nobody was paying for.

~ what the notice does not say ~

The closing notice is four sentences of extremely polite Japanese and it gives no date. It thanks readers for their patronage, says MangaX had provided a service where manga could be read for free, and then explains that 事業の方針転換などにより, through a change in business direction among other things, keeping the service running stably had become difficult, and that in light of ご利用状況, usage conditions, it would be ended. That phrase is the only account of cause anybody gets, and it means nobody was reading.

No capture of the site after the notice exists. The Archive had been crawling mangax.jp about once a month, 1,416 bytes each time, and the last of those is 17 February 2019. The next capture is November 2020 and it is a different page at six times the size. I would not have been a reader of this one under any circumstances, since it published in Japanese for a Japanese market and I was in Ankara writing computer vision code, but the shape is legible from anywhere: a company found a real niche, proved the comics could cross the border, and then discovered that the free website was the wrong business to be in while doing it.

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