ウルトラジャンプエッグ

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

~ the last words ~

Miss the nineteenth and you missed it. Ultra Jump Egg posted new manga chapters once a month and kept no back-issue shelf for readers, so anything you did not open inside its window was gone from the site. Shueisha ran it that way deliberately. It was a free web supplement to the print magazine Ultra Jump, edited by the same department that put out the paper one, and the point of a supplement is to send you to the newsstand.

It pre-opened on 29 December 2007 and opened properly on 19 March 2008. Everything ran through Adobe Flash in the browser, with no separate reader to install and no account to register, which in 2008 was about as little friction as a Japanese publisher was willing to put between a reader and a page. There was an internet radio show attached, おしゃたまラジオ, going out on Fridays for roughly a year before it stopped being made and became an archive.

On 19 August 2011 Shueisha folded the site into the Ultra Jump magazine's own website. The move finished on 17 September. The Archive's last unique copy of the front page is from 30 January 2011, which means the thing had already been sitting still for months by the time anyone announced anything. ultrajumpegg.com answers today with a Vietnamese-language WordPress install that has no connection to any of this.

~ the record ~

~ spin-offs and try-outs ~

The catalog was spin-offs and side projects rather than headline serials. キン肉マンレディー came from Yudetamago's studio, a women's wrestling take on Kinnikuman. くろまん was F4U. 最強魔法少女あきら and ねこ球9 sat alongside them, short runs by artists the parent magazine was trying out. None of it was load-bearing for Shueisha, which is exactly what a free web supplement is for.

That also explains the no-archive rule. A publisher giving away chapters in 2008 was nervous about giving away a library, and monthly-and-then-deleted was the compromise that let the legal side sign off. It read as generous and functioned as a leash.

~ read it now or not at all ~

Japanese publisher web manga in 2008 did not travel. A Flash viewer serving Japanese text off a Shueisha domain was addressed to people who already bought the magazine, and the free tier existed to convert them, not to find new readers in other countries. What reached Turkey in those years was the English scanlation web, which was neither licensed nor Japanese and had no relationship at all with the publishers whose pages it was scanning.

So the honest position on this one is that it was working correctly the entire time it was invisible to me. A supplement is a local object by design.

~ what the merge actually removed ~

Nothing was lost in the sense a shutdown usually means: the chapters had already been collected into volumes or dropped, and the merge moved the survivors onto the magazine site. What went away was the format. A free, monthly, self-deleting manga site was a specific answer to a specific problem, which was how a print publisher in 2008 could put something online without building an archive it would then have to defend.

Four years later the answer was apps with accounts, purchase histories and permanent libraries. The Flash viewer that needed nothing from you also remembered nothing for you, and the industry decided it preferred the trade the other way around.

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