In 2000, Nobuhiko Horie left Shueisha and together with financial investments from Hara, Hojo, and Shinchosha, founded Coamix, and worked towards the creation of
Weekly Comic Bunch.
Their vision was essentially to create a magazine that's
not defined by reader questionnaires. They weren't happy with Jump's policy of leaving the authors at the mercy of readers, and wanted to bring back the practice of older times (basically the days of FotNS, City Hunter) when
mangaka and editor had a much closer partnership in the creative process.
On top of that, most of its authors were former (axed) mangaka from Jump, targeting the old Jump readers seeking nostalgia of the 70s and 80s. They even held interviews of popular old Jump mangaka such as Inoue, asking how it felt to see their first series get axed.
They guaranteed
a minimum of 20K yen per page for all their serializations, which was a pretty high baseline, and took on the responsibility of
providing assistants themselves. They tried recruiting new authors through their New Comer awards with
a prize pool of 100 million yen (50M for 1st place), which was far beyond any other manga awards to this day. (1st place for Tezuka award is currently 2M)
Launching a manga magazine at this point in time was pretty much unheard of, let alone a
weekly magazine, when the whole magazine business was in free fall and other magazines were closing down left and right.
Yet, they went on an launched Weekly Comic Bunch in 2011 with plenty of anticipation, hoping for their radical(?) approach to shake things up.
Their launch lineup consisted of:
- Angel Heart - spinoff/sequel of City Hunter
- First of Blue Sky - sequel to FotNS
- Nemuri Kyoushiro - adaption of popular novel by Yanagawa Yoshihiro who had two axed series in Jump (Vice, Diamond)
- ReplayJ - based off of Ken Grimwood's novel of the same name by Imaizumi Shinji (Sora no Canvas, Kami-sama wa Southpaw)
- Restore Garage 241 - Tsugihara Ryuji (6 Jump axes)
- Kabushikigaisha Taro-kun - sequel to Jump's Kenritsu Taro-kun by Koseki Kouji
- Turkey Jumkie - Niwano Makoto (THE MOMOTAROH, Bomber Girl series)
- Ruler of the Land - Japanese release of Korea's most popular manhwa, which ended up being the first one to get canned after less than 15 chaps.
Unfortunately, history wasn't too kind to the ambitious magazine. It's hard to even say they managed to stick to their original vision. While it started strong with 500K print in its first year, that number was halved by 2005, and in 2010 the magazine was put to rest at 140K print. (some say it was kept alive thanks to First of North Star's pachinko money).
Its remains were split into Monthly Comic Bunch and Monthly Comic Zenon,
), but it's always a good time reading them !
