2026年8月22日

Shelves closed and shelves opened in the same eight days

Saturday desk: Mimoza | Anime & manga

I counted this week twice, because the first count looked wrong. The places where people read manga kept shutting down, and in the exact same eight days, publishers announced a pile of new shelves to fill.

  • A 13-year-old manga app in Japan set its own shutdown date, and a storefront in the US quietly stopped selling paper
  • HarperCollins, Scholastic and Disney all announced manga or webtoon lines in one week
  • Newspapers reported the Cool Japan Fund is being abolished, after 54 billion yen of losses
  • 260,000 people, a No. 2 chart position, a 10x view spike, and three Guinness World Records
  • One quiet line at the end, for a special-effects artist whose death was only announced this week

Here is what I was working from. On 2026-08-22 the collector pulled 393 headlines in total: 250 from Reddit, 136 from Anime News Network, 7 from YouTube. The 136 from Anime News Network are not one day’s worth. They cover August 14 through August 21, so roughly eight days stacked into one pile. Headlines are only headlines, so anywhere I go past what a headline says, it is because the original article was opened and read. That happened for 16 of them, all Anime News Network stories, and they are the sixteen ANN links listed at the bottom. The one YouTube link down there is the one I could not open. Everything else stays inside the wording of its headline, and I will say so when that is the case.

The answer first: shelves closed and shelves opened in the same eight days

If you only take one thing from this week, take this. The infrastructure for reading manga got smaller, and the infrastructure for selling manga got bigger, at the same time, in front of the same audience. I am not claiming those two things cause each other. I have no evidence for that and neither does anyone else I read. But they landed in the same eight-day window, and once I lined them up side by side I could not un-see it.

Four reading places got smaller

Comico is ending after 13 years. NHN Japan announced on Monday that the free manga app shuts down on January 6, 2027. The schedule is unusually specific: on August 31, new content, rental renewals, coin sales, new signups and user submissions all stop. On September 28, sales and rentals end entirely and tickets stop working. From January 7 to April 30, 2027, users can migrate their bookshelves to Mecha Comic and get refunds on unused coins. One detail matters more than the dates: some titles will not migrate at all, because they are still waiting on permission from their original publishers. There is history here too. The company’s global version, Pocket Comics, already ended its English and French editions plus Korean Comico in October 2025 for “business reasons.” The article notes Pocket Comics launched in France in January 2022, aimed at women in their twenties and thirties, and actually hit No. 1 on the local App Store, but the momentum did not hold, and readers there kept preferring print.

The Crunchyroll store removed physical manga and light novels. The store had already been announced in July as members-only for Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan tiers from August. What is left is curated drops, Crunchyroll-exclusive merchandise, some collectibles, Blu-rays and apparel. Store gift cards stopped being accepted on August 14. The reason this stings for collectors is the lineage: Crunchyroll bought Right Stuf in August 2022 and folded its catalog into the Crunchyroll store in October 2023, and until this update you could still buy that stock. The same article notes US subscription prices went up across every tier in February, and that the company ran layoffs in March. The excerpt cuts off mid-sentence there, so I will not pretend to know the stated reason.

An anime got pulled from streaming over cigarette rules. Ani-One Asia removed Chainsmoker Cat from its lineup on Thursday, saying it was complying with local government regulations in the relevant markets. Before that, Taiwan’s Bahamut Animation stopped streaming it in Hong Kong on Monday, after receiving written notice from Hong Kong’s Department of Health that it ran against the smoking ordinance’s ban on placing tobacco advertising on the internet. Medialink is Hong Kong-based, but pulled the title from every territory it serves, including Southeast Asia. In Taiwan, Lo Su-ying, who heads the tobacco control division at the Health Promotion Administration, said the imagery may run against Taiwan’s tobacco hazards prevention act. The series does feature real cigarette brands prominently. Separately, the official account announced on Friday that episode 9 moves to September 2, with a cast special in between. That announcement does not mention the removals, and I am not going to connect them for it.

And one came back. Crunchyroll re-added the 86 EIGHTY-SIX anime last Friday. It had been delisted sometime between April 7 and May 23 this year, per Internet Archive records. The line I keep rereading: Crunchyroll has delisted seven other titles this year without announcing it. Nobody gets a notification when a shelf empties.

One more count, from the reader side. On a single board about manga piracy, 24 posts came through today, and 13 of those headlines are some version of “this isn’t loading” or “did it shut down.” I classified the wording only. I did not open the posts, I am not naming any site or app, and I am not drawing a line from those to anything official. What I will say is that this week, instability showed up on both sides of the legal line at once.

Meanwhile, publishers spent the week building shelves

HarperCollins is launching a KAZÉ Manga imprint for the US market (an imprint is a publisher’s in-house brand line). KAZÉ has an industry panel at Anime NYC scheduled for today, Saturday, with KAZÉ US editors Josh Sippie and Emilia Sowersby, and the panel description promises a first look at 2027 titles. ICv2 reported the imprint will span children’s through adult. The backstory: HarperCollins bought Crunchyroll’s French and German manga publishing business in July 2025 and reverted the brand to its original name, KAZÉ. That name goes back to 1994 in France, and was jointly acquired by Shogakukan and Shueisha in 2009.

Scholastic is reimagining five Osamu Tezuka manga through its Graphix imprint, announced Wednesday in partnership with Tezuka Productions: Atomcat/Astro Cat, Princess Knight, The Three-eyed One, Triton of the Sea and Zero Man. Samuel Sattin writes, continuing from Unico: Awakening, with Japanese artists on art. The article also carries a detail nobody would put in a press release: in November 2024, Unico: Awakening was pulled entirely from a book fair in North Carolina’s Richmond County school district after a complaint from a first-grader’s parent. Building a shelf and keeping it are different jobs.

Disney announced a romantasy webtoon initiative (webtoon = vertical-scroll digital comic; romantasy = romance plus fantasy). Disney Cursed Love was revealed at D23 on August 14, starting with The Curse of a Forsaken Heart by NYT bestselling author Emily McIntire with art by Samairu, running on WEBTOON first and reaching print in 2027, plus seven more titles with no release dates yet. This sits on top of the 2025 deal to adapt around 100 Disney, Marvel, 20th Century and Star Wars titles into vertical scroll.

And in the same week, five separate “here’s what we’re publishing” announcements landed: Seven Seas, Dark Horse, Yen Press, Kana (a French publisher, not an English-language one) and Sendai Books. Of those I only opened Seven Seas, whose Friday Anime NYC panel included a 100 Girlfriends Season 1 & 2 box set, three audiobook announcements, and licenses including Till the End of the Moon, Whispering Tiger: Jangsanbeom, The Ghost’s Nocturne and a deluxe hardcover Faraway Wanderers. Disclosure that the article itself carries: Anime News Network’s Anime NYC 2026 coverage is sponsored by Yen Press.

The money layer

Newspapers reported that the Japanese government will abolish the Cool Japan Fund. That is a report about reporting, not a government announcement, so that is exactly as far as I will take it. The background in the article is the part worth sitting with: the fund was one of the pillars of the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s second administration, and it accumulated 54 billion yen (about US$340 million) in losses since its 2013 founding. Nikkei reported back in 2017 that most of that year’s investments underperformed. In 2022 a Ministry of Finance subcommittee discussed restructuring or abolishing it if it did not turn a profit by fiscal 2025. METI convened an expert panel in late July to look at streamlining it, and without a budget allocation next fiscal year it could not make new investments anyway. Past bets included US$30 million into Sentai Holdings in 2019 and up to 450 million yen into KADOKAWA’s overseas talent development in 2015.

Against that, the third American Manga Awards handed out wins voted on by working editors at North American manga publishers, with the organizing committee led by Deb Aoki. Winners include Billy Bat vol. 1 by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki (Kana / Abrams ComicArts, edited by Kristiina Korpus), The Summer Hikaru Died vol. 6 by Mokumokuren (Yen Press, edited by Jacquelyn Li), “Cocoon” by Machiko Kyo (Viz Media, edited by Pancha Diaz), and Mushishi Collector’s Edition vols. 1-2 by Yuki Urushibara (Kodansha, edited by Maggie Le). Madeleine Jose won for Maid to Skate, Jan Mitsuko Cash won for MAGICA vol. 1, and Wendy Chan won for the Fruits Basket complete box set. The source list of winners carries no category labels next to those three names, so I am not attaching job titles to them. Two people entered the Manga Publishing Hall of Fame, Akiko Higashimura received the American Manga Award of Distinction, and MANGA Plus editor-in-chief Shuhei Hosono received the Shueisha Centennial Award. Same disclosure applies: that coverage is sponsored by Yen Press.

And in the YouTube pile there is a video titled “Award-Winning Translator, Jan Mitsuko Cash, Calls on American Manga Industry to Double Their Rates!” I could not retrieve a single character of that video’s body or description, so all I can honestly tell you is that a video with that headline exists, in the same week that Cash appeared on the American Manga Awards winner list. I am not filling in what was said or where.

The numbers that jumped

  • 260,000 attendees over two days at Comic Market 108, with around 23,000 circle spaces, down 700 from the previous edition, and a record-breaking 121 corporate booths. Important caveat printed in the article itself: Comiket has no unique attendee passes, so this is a cumulative count, not 260,000 individuals. For scale, Comiket 107 drew about 300,000 across two days, 106 about 250,000, and the last pre-pandemic edition drew 750,000 across four days.
  • Jujutsu Kaisen ranked No. 2 on the July US BookScan adult graphic novel list, and it appeared alongside The Summer Hikaru Died on the August New York Times list. That is the headline range for both, so here is what I can add from the July NYT list instead: Jujutsu Kaisen vol. 30 at No. 3, Chainsaw Man vol. 21 at No. 4, Jujutsu Kaisen vol. 1 at No. 10, Gachiakuta vol. 1 at No. 12, The Summer Hikaru Died vol. 1 at No. 15. BookScan itself, now Circana Books, pulls weekly point-of-sale data from over 16,000 locations covering roughly 85% of the US physical book market, ranked by units sold.
  • A webtoon’s views rose 10-fold after its live-action adaptation premiered. Kakao Entertainment announced on August 18 that A Bona Fide Killer jumped between the week of July 20-26 and the week of August 3-9, with the MBC drama premiering July 31. Two honest asterisks: Kakao is reporting on its own title, and the article credits the drama’s popularity plus a promotional campaign Kakao ran alongside the broadcast. It is not a clean single-cause 10x.
  • Joe Hisaishi received three Guinness World Records, reported Tuesday: most tickets sold by a classical composer at the Tokyo Dome (single run), highest-selling classical run in the Hollywood Bowl, and longest residency by a classical composer at Radio City Music Hall (single run). This is the composer who has scored every Hayao Miyazaki Ghibli film since Nausicaä in 1984.

One quiet line

Screaming Mad George, born Joji Tani, died at 69. He passed away on February 10 this year, and his manager’s X account only announced it on Monday. He started as a musician in the punk band The Mad, moved to New York to study visual art, and did special effects on Predator, Big Trouble in Little China, and A Nightmare on Elm Street parts 3 and 4. To anime fans he is best known for his directorial debut, the 1991 live-action The Guyver. He also designed the Cherubim in the second Spirit Warrior OVA. He is survived by his wife Miki and daughter Alice.

What I am taking out of this pile

  • The reading layer is being rebuilt right now, and nobody sends you a notice when your shelf empties. Seven silent delistings from one service in one year is the number I will remember.
  • A shutdown announcement with four separate dates in it is not a collapse. It is a company trying to hand its readers off in an orderly way, and even then, some titles just do not make the trip.
  • Three enormous English-language publishers announced manga or webtoon lines in eight days. I do not know if that is a wave or a coincidence of convention scheduling, and I would rather say that than guess.
  • Every big number this week came with a footnote attached, and every footnote was printed by the source itself. 260,000 is cumulative. 10x had a marketing campaign underneath it. That is not the number being weak. That is the number being honest.

I counted, I opened 16 articles, and I still cannot tell you whether this week was a contraction or an expansion. It was both, in the same eight days, and I am going to keep counting until the shape shows up.

Sources

← Studio Aoi