While Japan is taking strong action against manga piracy in the country, a gap has opened up in the west for facilities to offer all the manga to fans. Over the years, manga piracy (and the maximum of other comics) reached heights, and now that the sites are closed, it means that creators and suppliers can get the money they deserve for their creations.
One of the most important names leading the rate to make manga more available in the West is a new app called Mangamo, which contains titles like Fire Force and Attack on Titan, Mangamo doesn’t play any games when it comes to offering Japan’s content to its Westerners. Audience.
Recently, we were able to talk to co-founder Dallas Middaugh and ask him about some of the app’s internal work, add value and long-term leads, add Western comics. With so much to come for Mangamo in the long run, the odds are endless.
Be sure to read below, and if you’re interested in full audio, be sure to pay attention to the LiteraryJoe’s Inner Child podcast below. Don’t express your opinion in the comments!
What I will say is that there are so many manga published in Japan, and there are so many that do not succeed in that market, there are so many opportunities there. So, when I wear my professional hat, I can just tell you, and I’ll pick an apparent hat, right?I mean, apparently, I’d like to have Shueisha on call. I’d love to have Shonen Jump titles, but they have their own service, which probably won’t happen soon.
So, when I look at it from a commercial perspective, of course, there are big publishers that I would kill just to have in the service, but when I look at it more from the point of view of my artistic fan and manga, you know I’m very satisfied with the publishers we have. We have all those series. Some of them had anime that you might have heard of as Somali and the Forest Spirit or Art or Dropkick on my Devil. You know others don’t have anime like Reset Game or Loving Yamada.
We need to keep uploading new editors because that’s our purpose and our project is to deliver as many manga in English, which is the easiest way to get as many other people read as possible. So my dream list is everyone’s. an editor.
The challenge with that, of course, is that even though we know there are, say, four, perhaps five primary publishers in Japan, there are more than two hundred publishers that should be full publishers and more than 200 entities publishing manga in Japan, so it can be difficult to pass and find out exactly which ones you need to get first, because in reality, everyone is doing an amazing job.
Because you actually had to catch them all. It was like reading the bankruptcy of a book, and that’s how I published in the anime, you know, when it comes to manga, I’m a fan of comics since I was born and when I was in school. It was definitely long before the days of Pokémon. Viz was dating a company called Eclipse, and they did things like Mai the Psychic Girl and Crying Freeman. And again, I had similar joy during my school years as when I was a kid to notice. this taste for storytelling, and this approach to storytelling that was so radically different from anything I’d ever seen. And he was infatuated with it.
But you know, the other story I like to tell is that what really led me to the manga edition was Hayao Miyazaki’s Natsujikai. When I went to interview Viz, I was much younger and I wasn’t really convinced to paint for the I liked the manga, but it wasn’t like a mega fan. And the user I interviewed went well, and passed me a copy of Natsujikai’s box and said, I think I really appreciate it.
And I came back and read it and I was very dazed. I mean, you know, it’s an amazing job. And I was so amazed at how smart I literally came back and said, “Okay, I need this job. I probably need to do this. And that’s wonderful because all of a sudden, you know, it’s not like you just go online and read these things easily. But we had a warehouse and I was able to go into the warehouse and pick things up and read them all the time. And I’ve read almost everything Viz has published in the two years I’ve worked there.
But at the end of the day, the service is Mangamo; it’s not Comicsmo, so we’re going to focus on the sleeve. The vast majority of what we’ll be offering will be Japanese manga.
Literary Joe: How did you avoid the price?
Dallas Middaugh: Well, you know, at the end of the day, there’s so many points out there, right?Not the minor, of course, you know, we know the scenes of what it costs to do all this, and the charge is not insignificant besides creating the app itself and the full-time staff. We place the maximum of the series we publish and pay for translation and design.
It’s not cheap, but having said that, you know, obviously, we can’t just approve and rate $20 a month, you know, we can’t just take a look at it and say, here’s the number that would be wonderful for us. We need to check to find that balance between what will allow us to run an effective business. What will ensure that enough money is transferred to the true creators of manga, but what can the market support?that is, all those things were points when we set the value of $4. 99.
* This interview has been edited for clarity and the audio part is jointly organized by editor Nick Brooks. *