MANGA Plus changed the game Part 1: The Age of Global JUMP


The age of Global JUMP

The start of a new age.

On January 28th, 2019, Shueisha ,the company that publishes Weekly Shonen Jump in Japan and many other manga magazine, launched a new service called "MANGA Plus" you can learn more about the service here & here . But in short, it is a service available as a website and app on both Android and ios devices that allow you to read the latest chapters of all the Manga(except Yuuna) from the Japanese Weekly Shonen Jump (and a few from Shueisha's other magazines) in English (Spanish coming soon) for FREE and it is available GLOBALLY(minus Japan, China & South Korea), on the Same day as Japan.

The backlogs are lacking right now, but a few are already there

The site and apps are pretty bare bones at the moment (it has been out for less than a day as of writing) but the main takeaway is that they have the latest Shonen Jump chapters up and available including the previous few chapters. Not only that, they have series previously without an official English translation (Hinomaru Sumo, David-kun, Blue Flags and others) and even some series that had never been translated into English before this (Moon Land, I am Japan

The service is in no way perfect, there are places that could use some improvements. The future of the service is not completely clear yet either, with people having questions about how will they handle backlogs, will there be a paid subscription to access previous chapters similar to Viz and about the Digital release of the volumes they mentioned in the announcement, and most importantly what series will be next?

I personally want to see a few more series covered over there(Aharen-san, Kaguya-sama, Golden Kamuy and Kingdom to name a few) but I believe this is just the start of something greater. Kodansha Comics with their frequent release of their digital first, and Kadokawa being such a huge force in the Manga industry could see this as a viable option to expand their global reach (and maybe then Shogakukan will follow suit)

MANGA Plus being a (near) globally available is such an important aspect of this service. Now, everyone everywhere can read these series officially and they would be supporting the Mangaka as a result. This also opens up the possibility of more language being available as the service matures, they could team up with local publisher of their manga with easier licensing deals, faster releases and more importantly significantly widening the reach.

This decision by Shueisha is huge step in the right directions of getting manga to the eyes of the readers around the world , and maybe other companies will follow in their footstep and we will evolve from just the Age of Global JUMP into the true Era for Global Manga.


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But a lingering question in the minds of  manga readers from the days of only scanlations were available, is how will this affect the speedscan? I will elaborate on that topic and why in my opinion, speedscans of (most and/or current) JUMP Series should just retire on Part 2 (coming soons)





MANGA Plus links