| Digital Manga has landed a very nice digital license: Its eManga site now carries Weekly Astro Boy Magazine, which despite its title is a lot more than just Astro Boy: It is an anthology that includes chapters of several different manga by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka is revered by many as the godfather of modern manga, and much of his work is available in English—but virtually none of it is available digitally. That’s not for want of trying: Tezuka Productions released a Weekly Astro Boy Magazine iPhone app in 2010 and an iPad app in 2011 that promised all sorts of delicious Tezuka content. The problem with both apps is that they didn’t work, and neither seems to be currently available in the iTunes store. What eManga offers is both bountiful and limited: They currently have the first ten issues of the magazine up on eManga with plans to add five more issues every week. The price is fairly reasonable, at $4.99 for over 100 pages of content—a little pricy for manga, but not out of line. And what’s there is good stuff: Jump right in with the first issue, and you get the first chapter of the Astro Boy story The Greatest Robot on Earth (which Naoki Urasawa adapted ingeniously into Pluto), as well as the first chapters of Phoenix, Dororo, and Black Jack. All are solid classics that make for fascinating reading. Unfortunately, they are not available for download but must be read in a web browser (with a live internet connection). And it’s small: the page size in eManga’s reader seems to be fixed; you can zoom in by double-tapping but you have to move the page around to see different parts of it—the window through which you are looking at it doesn’t get any bigger. One saving grace is that the Digital reader works on an iPad, which is a much more comfortable way to read. The other thing, which wasn’t a deal-breaker for me but might be for less experienced manga readers, is that some of the stories read left to right while others read right to left, Japanese style. Manga readers often have strong feelings as to whether or not the art should be flipped; I actually think it’s a good idea if the publisher is looking to bring in new readers. What’s confusing is to have one story read one way and the next story read the other way (although the page turns go in the same direction no matter what). I hope TezukaPro gives Digital more digital rights to Weekly Astro Boy, as I would love to be able to download it. Still, even the online reader is far, far better than what went before, and it provides an affordable way to read a lot of Tezuka manga—legally—online. Osamu Tezuka Manga Now Available on eManga is a post from: E-Reader News |
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Osamu Tezuka Manga Now Available on eManga
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment