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Fanroad, Ace Assault, Big Comic 1 Mags End in Japan
posted on by Egan Loo
After 29 years, the Fanroad anime magazine ended publication with its April issue, which shipped on Saturday. Unlike other long-running anime magazines such as Tokuma Shoten's Animage (1978—present) and Gakken's Animedia (1981—present), Fanroad specialized in printing reader-submitted content such as artwork, comics, and even recipes. Its original publisher was Rapport, who launched it as a sibling magazine to its more conventional anime magazine, Animec (1978—1987). When Rapport went out of business in October 2003, Fanroad went on hiatus briefly before Shonen Gahosha's affiliate company Daitosha revived it in December 2003.
Kadokawa Shoten's Zōkan Ace Assault manga magazine has similarly ended in the Spring issue, which shipped on Wednesday. Zōkan Ace Assault had only just begun on July 10, 2007 as a quarterly spinoff of the same publisher's Monthly Shōnen Ace magazine. Shōnen Ace will inherit three manga series from Zōkan Ace Assault: Masahiro Kawanabe's manga adaptation of BONES' Xam'd: Lost Memories anime, Kei Sanbe's Kamiyadori no Nagi, and Sakae Esuno's Sakae Esuno's Mirai Nikki: Paradox. Zōkan Ace Assault's other titles have ended with the magazine's last issue. Amazon listed Esuno's original Future Diary manga among Tokyopop's future offerings in North America.
Shogakukan's Big Comic 1 manga magazine ended with its April 12 issue on Thursday. The magazine launched in 2001 as a spinoff from the more famous Big Comic magazine and Big Comic Special magazine. 22 Big Comic 1 issues shipped on an irregular schedule during the last eight years. Among other works, the last issue of Big Comic 1 ran Katsushi Katsukawa's Dokuro-tō no Hitobito and Jiro Taniguchi's Hyakunen no Keifu.
Source: newAkiba.com (not safe for the workplace), Comic Natalie (link 1, link 2)
