Service launched in 2013
NHN Japan Corporation has announced that its popular free manga application, Comico, will officially shut down on January 6, 2027, after a 13-year run. To accommodate existing users, the company has arranged to transfer previous purchases over to the Mecha Comic digital bookstore.
© NHN comico Corp.
Ahead of the final closure, the platform will begin winding down features on August 31, at which point new content updates, rental renewals, coin purchases, and account registrations will cease. Users will also lose the ability to publish new works to the platform after that date.
All sales and rentals will wrap up permanently on September 28, rendering tickets unusable.
Between January 7 and April 30, users can migrate their digital bookshelves to the designated alternative platform and request refunds for any remaining unused coins. However, certain titles may be excluded from the transfer process depending on publisher approvals.
This news follows structural cutbacks by the international webtoon platform Pocket Comics, which discontinued its English, French, and Korean services in October 2025 due to changing business conditions.
NHN originally debuted the Pocket Comics application for English-speaking readers in the U.S., Canada, and Singapore back in July 2020. Its initial library featured 41 titles spanning both Japanese manga and Korean webtoons. Notable Japanese releases included Yayoiso‘s ReLIFE, Kakeru Utsugi‘s How to keep a mummy, Kurose‘s Momokuri, and Shō Futamata‘s Nanbaka—all of which inspired anime adaptations.
Although Pocket Comics initially surged in popularity after launching in France in January 2022 by appealing to female readers in their 20s and 30s, that momentum eventually slowed as local audiences continued to favor physical print manga.
First introduced in 2013 by NHN PlayArt, Comico grew into a widely used smartphone app for serialized manga, eventually expanding into localized versions for Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Sources: Comico‘s X/Twitter account, Comic Natalie