ComiPedia - Manga Magazine Guide, Publishers Guide, Comic Imprints, Light Novel Labels, and More!

ComiPress is proud to announce the launch of ComiPedia, the newest reincarnation of our old Manga Magazine Guide. In ComiPedia you'll find:

Manga Magazine Guide: A guide to Japanese manga anthologies/phone books.
Manga Publisher Guide: A guide to Japanese manga publishers.
Comic Imprint and Light Novel Label Guide: A guide to comic imprints and light novel labels.

And more!

*An U.S. Magazine/Publisher Guide is in the works.

Feel free to join our forum and let us know what you think of this new project. If you'd like to contribute, please look for more information here.

Special thanks to NeoSam, Blue-Ghost, ocean, and Ed Chavez for all their help and support.

History of ComiPedia:

In the summer of 2003, a user on the AoD forum who goes by the name Usaku started a thread titled "Guide to Publishers and 'Phonebook' Manga - help welcomed." Many users contributed to the thread, most notably Ed Chavez (who went by the name Osaka at the time, and later went on to create MangaCast) and niche_manga_reader. However, the project came to a halt in early 2004, people stopped posting new information, and the thread was left alone with no updates for almost a year.

Fast forward to winter of 2004, I came across the old "Phonebook Project," and was surprised by the amount of information gathered. Uncertain whether the project was going to continue, the information in the thread was edited and then copied onto a .txt document (the attachment of which can be found at the end of this post) to be preserved for the future.

For the next 6 months, new information, links, and manga anthologies were added to the text document. In August 2005, the material on the text document was uploaded on to Bloggers, but was soon taken down because Bloggers wasn't the best tool for managing this project.

A few months later, with the help of Blue-Ghost from Anipike, a HTML version of the magazine guide was put up at www.blue-ghost.com/magazine/.

A few months later, the project was moved to Manga Jouhou, where it was hosted for almost a year. Toward the end of 2005, a newer version of the magazine guide, dubbed "Magazine^2", was released, with more sorting options and better organization. However, the project was still stuck in a static HTML page, making updating exttemely difficult. It was also during this period that NeoSam joined the project, who later became the Magazine Guide's biggest contributor.

In April of 2006, ComiPress Beta was launched using WordPress, and with it came the last HTML version of the Magazine Guide. In August of 2006, with the official launch of ComiPress.com, the old HTML magazine guides were taken down. For the next few months, a new database-driven "Magazine Guide" was being worked on. The final product, ComiPedia, provides information on manga anthology, publishers, comic imprints, novel labels, and more.