ぽこぽこ

» see poco2.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The logo had a slogan printed in a small box above it: ホメられて伸びるタイプのweb連載空間. A web serialization space of the type that improves when you praise it. That is an odd line to put on a masthead, and it was also an accurate product description, because the feature ぽこぽこ was built around was a comment box shaped like a speech balloon.

Ohta Publishing is a Tokyo house better known for its magazines and its nonfiction than for a manga line, and in April 2011 it put a web magazine online with Usamaru Furuya listed as supervisor and a mascot called ぽこぽこちゃん in the corner. No account was needed to read. Everything was free, and every chapter stayed up permanently including the chapters of series that had already ended, which was not the common arrangement in 2011 and is rarer now.

The plan had been to open on 17 March 2011. A trial run with five hundred invited readers started on the 10th, and the earthquake came on the 11th. The site did not actually open until 14 April. The announcement gives no reason for the delay and I am not going to supply one, but those are the dates in the order they happened.

Reading it was never going to be my business. The whole mechanic was writing a Japanese sentence into a balloon on somebody else's drawing, and the reason I can quote the slogan at all is that it is baked into a logo file the Internet Archive still holds.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the comment in the balloon ~

Comment systems on manga sites normally live in a column under the page, where they behave like comment systems behave everywhere. ぽこぽこ put them on the art. You clicked a panel and got a balloon, and whatever you wrote sat on the drawing in the shape the medium reserves for speech. A comment on a comic, drawn as a comic.

Furuya's name was attached to the site rather than to one series in it. He supervised the whole thing and serialized ぼくらの☆ひかりクラブ there as a prequel to his own Litchi Hikari Club. He is also the one who later proposed the strangest business the site ever ran.

~ the portraits ~

On 1 April 2014 ぽこぽこ began taking commissions for portraits. You paid three hundred thousand yen a piece and a manga artist drew your face. Furuya was on the launch roster with Shintaro Kago and Kana Otsuki. Suehiro Maruo joined in May and the service ran properly from there.

Three hundred thousand yen was around three thousand dollars at the 2014 rate, which puts it past merchandise and somewhere in commissioned-art territory. The thing that made it work at all was that the names taking the money were people whose pages you could read on the same site for nothing.

~ where the comics went ~

The notice went up on 8 July 2016 and said updates would stop on the 29th. Ohta Web Comic opened on that same 29 July with the serialized titles transferred across, and the interviews and the portrait service were moved onto Ohta Publishing's own pages.

Takako Shimura's 淡島百景 was unfinished at the handover and kept running on the new site until it wrapped in 2024. Shuzo Oshimi's 志乃ちゃんは自分の名前が言えない had already closed there, eleven chapters between 21 December 2011 and 17 October 2012, and it was made into a live-action film in 2018. Rensuke Oshikiri's ピコピコ少年 ran two volumes on ぽこぽこ and a third on the successor.

Most of what the site did came through the rename intact. Ohta Web Comic is still publishing at webcomic.ohtabooks.com and the portrait commissions are still listed on ohtabooks.com. poco2.jp has no DNS record, and the only surviving copy of the slogan sits inside a 264 by 138 pixel PNG in an archive crawl from 2014.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »