Webコミックゲッキン (YOMBAN)

» see comic-gekkin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Bandai Visual sold anime on disc. In February 2009 it also started publishing comics, for free, on a website called YOMBAN, a contraction of 読むバンダイビジュアル, "read Bandai Visual." The site opened on the 2nd with an editorial blog that updated every weekday and two mascot characters, よむ and ばん, drawn by Sanae Takeda, who showed up all over the interface pointing at things.

Nothing required an account and nothing cost money. Chapters went up on the 1st and the 15th and stayed up with no expiry date, rendered in a viewer built into the page that needed no download and did not care which browser or operating system you brought to it. That was a real selling point in 2009, when several of the competing Japanese comic sites still wanted you to install something that only ran on Windows.

The catalog gave away what the site was for. A home video company with a shelf of anime licenses used a comic site to stretch them further: Milky Holmes tie-ins for Bushiroad, a spin-off of P.A. Works' 花咲くいろは. Underneath that ran a layer of original work that had nothing to do with any disc. Toh EnJoe, three years before his Akutagawa Prize, serialized a novel called ホワイトスペース here. Hiroyuki Morioka of Crest of the Stars serialized another one that would not reach print until December 2019.

~ the case file ~

~ the name ~

On 1 October 2010 the site was renamed Webコミックゲッキン, after 週2コミック! ゲッキン, a mobile phone comic magazine operated by Emotion, a Bandai Visual subsidiary. ゲッキン is assembled from 月曜 and 金曜, Monday and Friday, the two days that magazine came out. The website now named after those two days updated on the 1st and the 15th.

~ the slide ~

The rename arrived with conditions attached. The catalog was synced to the mobile magazine's, and the promise that everything stayed readable forever was quietly withdrawn: back numbers for some titles were pulled on 30 September 2010, the day before the new name went up. That December, Kadokawa Group Publishing began printing collections under an Emotion Comics label, which is the point at which a free site turns into a funnel.

On 1 July 2011 the whole operation was cut back hard. Updates dropped to once a month, on the 1st, and most of the running serials were ended between late June and early September. Later that same month 週2コミック! ゲッキン shut down, leaving a website named after the two weekdays of a magazine that no longer came out on either of them.

~ what survived it ~

Updates stopped on 3 September 2012, three years and seven months after the site opened. Exactly one title was carried out alive: 英雄伝説 空の軌跡, Shinki Kitsutsuki's adaptation of the Nihon Falcom role-playing game, which had been running since 1 October 2009 and moved over to Bandai Visual's own site to continue.

The rest went where webcomics go. Some of it was reprinted on paper by Kadokawa and some of it survives as a Wayback capture of the March 2013 front page, frozen on its final update. I was not reading any of this in 2009 and had no route to it: the site was Japanese-language and Japan-facing, built for people already buying the discs it existed to advertise. Morioka's novel waited another seven years for a publisher. The site was a stack of media-mix promotion with a few genuinely strange things buried inside it, and the strange things outlived the promotion.

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