WEB Comic High!

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

~ the obit ~

Futabasha opened WEB Comic High! on 20 August 2008 as the web arm of its print magazine Comic High!, which had been running since March 2004 on an unusual editorial line: shojo-style manga drawn for male readers. The site kept that line and said so in English across the top of its own banner: Girlish Comics for Boys and Girls. You did not need an account and there was no viewer to install.

Updates landed on fixed dates every month, the 10th and the 20th, with a third slot on the 30th, and moved a day earlier when the date fell on a holiday. On 30 June 2011 the publisher opened a sister site, Otome High!, aimed at girls, and handed it the 30th. The title most readers outside Japan would know is Tsugumomo, which started here, left for the new Monthly Action in 2013 and had a television anime by 2017.

On 10 April 2013 Futabasha collapsed all of this into one address. WEB Comic High! and Otome High! were folded into the serialization page of Manga Action's official site, the result was renamed WEB Comic Action, and the URL of the older page came along. Work from the Futabasha Web Magazine arrived in the same move, along with titles stranded when COMIC Sumomo suspended that February.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what free meant in 2008 ~

Japanese publishers spent the late 2000s trying to put comics on the web without giving them away, which usually meant a proprietary reader and a login before you saw a single panel. Futabasha went the other direction on this site. Anyone could read the first chapter of any serial plus whatever had not yet been collected into a book, in a browser, with nothing installed. It was an advertisement for the print volumes and it was honest about being one.

None of this crossed to Turkey. What reached readers here in those years was fan translation on somebody else's server, not a publisher's own free site, and I cannot read Japanese anyway, so a page like this was shut to me the entire time it was open. The interesting part from the outside is the business decision rather than the comics: a mid-size publisher deciding in 2008 that the web copy should be free and frictionless, years before that became the standard answer.

~ the label that walked out ~

On 27 September 2017 the site started a new imprint inside itself called Monster Comics, mostly manga adaptations of light novels from Futabasha's Monster Bunko line. It did well enough that on 2 December 2019 it was spun out as its own site, GauGau Monster, taking its serials with it. A web magazine that grows a successful section and then loses it to an independent address is a pattern print never had to deal with.

~ the two endings ~

The functional death is 27 March 2020. Futabasha opened web Action that day, the serials moved there, and what stayed behind was reduced to a portal about the company's print magazines with no comics of its own. That husk stayed up for three years.

The formal death is April 2023, when the old URL began redirecting to web Action. Japanese Wikipedia marks the moment with 完全消滅, complete disappearance. Today comichigh.jp answers with a Japanese affiliate blog that has nothing to do with any of it, so even the redirect is gone now.

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