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J-Comi Posts 1st User-Submitted, 'Purified' Manga Scans
posted on by Egan Loo
Negima/Love Hina creator Ken Akamatsu's J-Comi manga distribution site posted the first title from its "Illegal Out-of-Print Manga File Purification Project" on Wednesday evening. Under the project, J-Comi "purifies" or legalizes unauthorized scans of out-of-print manga from file-sharing networks by adding advertising to the existing files — with the creators' permission. The first title is Tetsuya Kurosawa and Hidehisa Masaki's one-volume manga Player wa Nemurenai: The Man Lost in the Network Labyrinth. It is already available for free browsing online.
Kurosawa developed Player wa Nemurenai (The Player Cannot Sleep) after a Shogakukan editor asked him if he could tell a story about a monster born in a computer network. Shogakukan had serialized the manga in Big Comic Spirits magazine, and then Tokuma Shoten published it in book form with revisions in 1993.
According to Akamatsu, J-Comi had just received the ZIP-compressed files for the manga Tuesday night, shortly after he launched the "purification" project. Akamatsu cautions that it has some adult scenes, although not erotic ones.
