Mangamo, the first cross-publisher, mobile manga subscription service, wants to change the way otaku consume their favorite Japanese comics.
While the digital revolution in traditional print publishing has forever changed the Western comic book world over the past decade, Japan's manga industry has been far slower to adapt. This gaping hole has helped give rise to webcomics, dominated by the South Korean website, WEBTOON, attracting billions of readers (yes, billions) from around the world to its vertical-scrolling library of manhwa. On the sinister side of things, the lack of instant availability and affordability of manga has also driven consumers toward pirated content, the boom of which is estimated to have siphoned further billions -- in yen -- from both Japanese and American markets.
As Netflix and other streaming services have done for television and film, Mangamo hopes to remedy this economic drain by offering an all-you-can-eat platform of titles from multiple publishers and creators. But is the app worth adding to your monthly, entertainment subscription bill? Let's see what your $4.99 per month can get you, and how the service stacks up against its competition to find out.
Mangamo: An Overview of the App
The first thing you'll notice about Mangamo after downloading it is its sleek, bumblebee-themed packaging. Optimized for mobile and tablet use only, the app has a minimal layout that prioritizes image over text, with just three tabs to click on: Explore, Browse and My Manga. Explore is the home screen, featuring the most recently updated series along the top and curated recommendations under various genre banners, as well as more niche forms of categorization: "Isekai Madness!" These are reminiscent of the oddly-specific groupings that Netflix sometimes throws at you. "Action Movies With a Strong Female Lead?" Sure!
My Manga is where you can bookmark manga that you're reading or want to read, while Browse shows you the app's complete library. Clicking the menu in the top left corner will open up genre filters, which are as diverse as "Ecchi", "Slice of Life," "Kawaii" and even "Escape Room." Select multiple genres to discover the rare series that will scratch as many of your genre itches as possible. Reading-wise, everything is oriented in the correct right to left format.
How Does Mangamo Compare to its Competition?
In terms of dedicated manga apps, Mangamo's biggest competitor at present is Viz Media's Shonen Jump. New simulpublished, English-language chapters are available to be read for free -- both through the app and Viz's website -- but for a very low fee of $1.99, subscribers not only get full access to some of the biggest shonen hits around from Shueisha, like One Piece, Dragon Ball Super and My Hero Academia, but also an archive of over 10,000 chapters from other past and present titles. Whatsmore, some chapters are digital-only, like Spy x Family and Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku. As an added bonus, digital volumes are also available for purchase to keep, providing a nice "try before you buy" feel.
The app is also as well-designed as Mangamo and allows readers to download chapters for on-the-go reading without an Internet connection (though they expire after one week.) The biggest drawback, though, is that readers are limited to Shueisha's catalog alone. Fans of manga distributed by Kodansha, like Attack on Titan and Seven Deadly Sins, will have to go to Crunchyroll's own manga app instead, which is available to members only for $6.95 per month. Unfortunately, the service is frequently buggy and doesn't allow for offline reading, either.
This means that ComiXology is currently the best, one-stop-shop that manga readers have as far as digital manga is concerned, with Dark Horse, Viz, Kodansha, Yen Press and Seven Seas among its list of publishers. A ComiXology Unlimited subscription will set you back $5.99 per month and gets you access to everything the platform has to offer, which includes some simulpublished titles, like Attack on Titan, as well as some that are exclusive to the service. And, as ComiXology is an Amazon company, chapters and volumes can also be transferred to your Kindle for offline reading. The only problem is that the Unlimited subscription is, ironically, limited to certain countries at present, so international readers have to make do with what they can get without a subscription.
The where other services are found lacking make Mangamo very appealing: easy to use and discover new series; global availability; reasonably priced and a library of cross-publisher manga set to expand by the hundreds over the next three months. However, at the time of writing, there's little to draw otaku's sole attention away from the likes of the well-stocked Shonen Jump: Attack on Titan, Somali and the Forest Spirit and Arte are the most recognizable that the fledging app has to offer. Presently, this makes Mangamo more of a "watch this space" case, but the two-month free trial currently on offer from its developers is certainly one worth taking up.
