WEBコミックガンマ

» see webcomicgamma.takeshobo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In May 1996 Takeshobo closed a manga magazine called コミックガンマ after thirty-four issues. Most of its serials stopped mid-story, because the publisher had no sister title to move them into and no successor magazine ready. Seventeen years later it put the name back on the internet.

WEBコミックガンマ opened on 12 December 2013 and started publishing comics two weeks later, on 26 December. It was not new construction. Takeshobo's free four-panel site まんがライフWIN had a story-manga annex called まんがライフWIN+, and the annex was handed the dead magazine's masthead and run as its own address from then on. The editorial brief stayed close to the paper version: science fiction and fantasy, aimed at readers who had finished with boys' magazines.

It closed on 17 October 2025, when Takeshobo merged four of its web comic sites into a single site called 竹コミ!. The website lasted almost three times as long as the magazine whose name it was using.

~ the case file ~

~ the name it borrowed ~

コミックガンマ launched in January 1992 as a quarterly spinoff of まんがくらぶ, went bimonthly in September 1993 and monthly in September 1994. Its readers were teenagers who had outgrown shonen titles and were not ready for the seinen ones, and its business model was media mix: manga tied to anime, with CD releases on King Records' Starchild label alongside. Plenty of Japanese magazines did this later and did it bigger. ガンマ did it early.

The ending was sudden. Takemoto Izumi has written that he heard the magazine was folding while he was still working on storyboards, and rewrote his plan so that さよりなパラレル could at least finish. The last issue in May 1996 hinted at a new magazine carrying the same concept the following summer, and that magazine never appeared. Editors off the masthead were hired away to Kadokawa and elsewhere, which is why the magazines that came after it look so much like it.

~ the hole ~

Akihito Tsukushi began メイドインアビス in October 2012, on the annex, a year before the rename. It follows an orphan named Riko who climbs down into a pit in the ground with no measured bottom, looking for her mother, alongside a boy who turns out to be partly a machine. It is drawn in a soft round style that gives no warning about what the story eventually does to its characters. By August 2025 it had over 22 million copies in circulation, and in 2023 it took the 52nd Japan Cartoonists Association Award.

The anime reached me in 2017 and the film in 2020, both over streaming, and nothing in either of them points back at a publisher's free web page. That is where the chapters landed first. Made in Abyss is still running today, on 竹コミ!, with everything else that moved.

~ four sites into one ~

The notice went up on 19 September 2025. WEBコミックガンマ, its 2018 sibling WEBコミックガンマぷらす, ストーリアダッシュ and まんがライフWIN would all become 竹コミ! on 17 October, with the running series carried across. まんがライフWIN was the site ガンマ had been spun out of in the first place, and it died the same day, which put the two names back in one box after twelve years apart.

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