Webスピカ

» see gentosha-comics.net/spica/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Spica began as a paper thing and failed at it fast. Gentosha Comics launched it in October 2003 as a supplement to コミックバーズ, carrying titles moved over from another magazine, and killed it with Vol. 2 in January 2004. Three months later it came back as a website, free for seven months, then went behind the same 210 yen paywall as 幻蔵 and MAGNA on a site called WebコミックGENZO.

On 26 December 2008 the arrangement was simplified. スピカ and 幻蔵 stopped being two subscriptions and became one package under the single name Webスピカ, with Macintosh support arriving in the same change. 幻蔵 did not survive it as a title. From then it was a monthly josei magazine delivered as a file, distributed around the 28th for the following month's cover date, with Akari Funato's Under the Rose as its best-known serial and a prequel to it given away a hundred pages at a time.

Reading it required a browser plugin called Crochet. Internet Explorer installed it for you automatically. Everyone else, including the Mac users the 2008 relaunch had just invited in, went and fetched it by hand. The purchase and the reading were both handled by Voyager Store, a Japanese ebook operation that ran the shop underneath the magazine.

~ the record ~

~ the plugin ~

I know the shape of this from the other side of the world. An Internet Explorer install that just happens to you, with no dialog you can meaningfully answer, was normal in Turkey in 2008 too, and half of what a support conversation consisted of was asking whether the plugin had taken. What was not normal anywhere outside Japan was a publisher choosing that mechanism on purpose, in 2008, for a magazine, and then keeping it for another four years while the rest of the web moved to things that needed nothing installed at all.

The reason was the page. Japanese manga is laid out for paper and reads right to left, and a plugin let Gentosha ship a viewer that turned pages the correct way and kept the artwork out of the browser's reach. The bill for that decision came due later, in the form of a magazine that could not be read on a phone browser at the exact moment Japanese comics were moving onto phones. Webスピカ had a mobile route, through the carrier site GENZO/幻冬舎コミックス, which ran on every Japanese network of the day, but a carrier menu is not a phone browser.

~ who it was for ~

This was a josei magazine, which is to say it was aimed at adult women, and in 2009 that audience was being sold a paid download requiring a Windows-first plugin. The serial roster was the kind of lineup a paper magazine would have been pleased with: Akari Funato, Ryo Ikuemi, Kineko Abekawa, Kita Konno, Kuruneko Yamato. Under the Rose, Funato's long historical serial about a Victorian English household, was the name that carried the subscriptions, and a hundred pages of its prequel were put up free to pull people through the door.

The address never caught up with any of this. The front page was still loading under the name of a magazine that had stopped publishing in 2008, which is dealt with in full on the grave for 幻蔵 and is not worth telling twice.

~ how it ended ~

In October 2011 Gentosha launched comicスピカ, an A5 monthly on paper, described as a sister magazine to the web one. Publishers do not usually run two magazines with the same name in two media for long, and this pair lasted eight months. The June 2012 issue of Webスピカ and No. 10 of comicスピカ were merged into a single magazine and the web serials moved to the paper one. A magazine that had gone from print to web in 2004 went back the other way in 2012.

By September 2012 the /spica/ path was serving the print magazine's page. comicスピカ itself lasted until No. 42, announced in March 2015, with its remaining serials scattered to 月刊バーズ and to a web site called デンシバーズ. Crochet is gone and so is the store that sold through it. Under the Rose is still in print.

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