COM (magazine)

COM was a Japanese manga magazine that appeared from 1967 to 1973. COM stands for Comics, Companion, Communication .

The alternative magazine Garo was founded in 1964 and broke new ground in the manga market with surrealist publications by artists like Yoshiharu Tsuge . Because Garo was very successful with it, the manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka (among others Astro Boy ) founded COM, a counterpart to Garo. The magazine was published by Tezuka's production company Mushi Productions and attracted attention mainly through new, unknown talent for drawing. So worked, among other things Moto Hagio , Daijiro Mohoroshi and Mitsuru Adachi for the magazine. Osamu Tezuka himself also drew some, mostly experimental, manga for the magazine; much of his phoenix was published in COM. Other important employees were Fujio Akatsuka , Fujiko Fujio , Shōtarō Ishinomori (including some chapters from his successful series Cyborg 009 appeared in COM), Hideko Mizuno , Shinji Nagashima , Hisashi Sakaguchi , Keiko Takemiya and Jirō Tsunoda .

COM was discontinued in 1971. In 1973 a new attempt was started, but this also failed after one issue because Mushi Productions went bankrupt. Some employees of the magazine like Murasaki Yamada then switched to Garo.

Tezuka's magazine Funny , the first manga magazine for women ( Josei ) , was the sister magazine of COM .