少年タケシ

» see fujitv.co.jp/takeshi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 1998 I was on a 33.6k modem in Ankara and Flash was the thing that made the web move. Anyone online in that window has some memory of a Flash cartoon arriving a frame at a time over a phone line. Mine are not Japanese ones, and this was as Japanese as it gets: a comics page inside the corporate website of Fuji Television, updated three times a week and never in any language I could read.

少年タケシ opened in September 1998 as 週刊少年タケシ, Weekly Shonen Takeshi. It grew out of an internet video program called ウルトラタケシ on Fuji's Odaiba Channel, made by an editor named Hirokazu Koide, who then became the comic site's editor in chief. The comics were Flash animations from a deliberately wide bench of artists, some famous, some illustrators who had never drawn a strip before. New ones landed every Friday. Columns went up on Wednesdays.

A television network running a free comics magazine on its own domain, for over a decade, is not a thing broadcasters do. It was not a promotional page for a show and it had nothing to sell. Someone inside Fuji TV simply kept it funded, and the animeanime writeup from 2006 calls it a pioneer of free-to-view net comics, which by then it had been for seven years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ hirokazu koide ~

Koide died on 19 January 2006, seven years into the site he had started. Fuji TV brought in Shinji Fukuhara, a producer whose credits included Ugo Ugo Lhuga and Einstein, as second editor in chief, and in April that year the whole thing was rebuilt as a proper web magazine rather than a comics page.

What the relaunch added was everything a magazine has and a comics site does not: essay columns from writers and economists, plus a reader-participation section built around photo and video submissions. Books came out through Fusosha and a DVD followed in December 2006. There were events, and there were live streams that ran past five hours.

~ the image girls ~

By 2007 there was a mobile edition, ケータイタケシ, and the site had started casting faces for itself. Maomi Yuki was Miss Shonen Takeshi. Mikako Tabe, early in the screen career that followed, was Sister Shonen Takeshi. The 2011 image-girl audition drew more than a thousand applicants for three places.

That is a strange amount of apparatus for a page of Flash comics, and it is the clearest sign of what the site had turned into by the end. It was no longer a comics site with columns attached. It was a small television production that happened to live at a URL.

~ 30 march 2012 ~

The updates stopped on 30 March 2012 and no reason was given. The Japanese record uses 更新休止, update suspension, rather than the word for closure, and some of the strips running that week simply end unfinished. Adobe announced the end of Flash five years after that.

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