If you thought there was a need for a new place to provide manga, well, here’s Manga.Club! It’s a brand new service providing free manga that started late last year, and is slowly building itself up as the months go on. Through email I was able to send over questions to Daniel, who is the Head of Global Business at Torico. He shares why this service got started and what Manga.Club will be up to in the upcoming months, among other things, below:
TheOASG: Tell me a bit about yourself and how you got into manga.
Daniel: Firstly, thank you for allowing me some of your time! I’d like to also thank you in advance for accepting my English as it is. I also appreciate the chance to share a little bit more about our growing project.
I was raised across a few countries that spoke Chinese, Japanese and English. I was raised in Japan during elementary school and manga, being a large part of Japan’s popular culture, was one of the very first ways I loved to spend my free time. As a young adult, I would often chat amongst friends about various manga topics even after I moved to Canada and non-Japanese speaking countries. Now, these common connections act as a bridge for our company, which allowed me to connect to and provide entertainment to truly awesome readers around the world.
What is TORICO, and how did the opportunity to work there come about?
TORICO serves the delivery of manga culture in various multitudes: as three bookshops, two e-book services, and a manga exhibition event venue. While Manga.Club is new to the playing field, our other services are quite well-known. Most recently, our vision developed into something more than just selling and shipping a culture, we wanted to dive straight into the core of the creativity itself. Last year, we established two new business: one is the Publication Department where original manga is created, and the other is where I am, the Global Department. Our hope is to bring all of what TORICO offers to overseas manga lovers. I joined at the recommendation of my best friend who actually runs the Publication Department today.
When did the idea of Manga.Club come about? And why that particular name?
Initially, there were two options: manga.bar, where anyone could choose their “favorite flavor” of manga under a never-ending tap, and then there was manga.club. The idea for manga.club came from our interest in working with public manga clubs (just like the ones you might find at a university, bookstore, or library). We wanted to recreate the same kind of atmosphere but digitally and available to the entire world. In addition, we didn’t want to be just another reading service – there are too many people doing that as it is. We strive to be a service that provides official manga as the topical thread between our users, and the platform is where we will introduce new ways manga can be enjoyed. It’s difficult to make promises during the development phase, but there are so many functions we want to roll out that could really amplify the manga reading community’s experience globally.
What’s your specific role with this service?
For manga.club, I work with publishers, translators, typesetters, designers, who are all an awesome, supportive community of people shaping acquisition and localization of manga in our company. I also work with a team of engineers who want to create the next best manga service. It is with the help and support of colleagues that I was able to convince our boss to get manga.club started. Basically, I am responsible for anything that happens with the service.
Since Manga.Club looks like it started around the end of last year, I know there’s a ways to go with it. So I’ll ask this: What’s been the most interesting part of running this service?
The most interesting aspect of manga.club’s journey is the level of involvement from everyone in the project. Although the community is still small, people around the world – and I can off-the-top-of-my-head name about 15 countries – are part of what helps to shape our project today. They are talented people who love tackling new challenges and improving the service in all of its varied aspects. My heart tells me that we are a team of people who love and cannot live without manga. We are working at our best abilities to share what we love with fellow manga lovers out there. It’s an honor to be working with this versatile team structure, and I learn more than I can share. I’m really happy about it.
You have content not just from Japan, but it looks like elsewhere as well. What type of criteria is the staff looking for for a title to be placed on the service?
We’re not the biggest publisher out there, and we don’t pretend to be. But we work with wonderful partners. To answer the question, we embrace the word “manga” in all of its varied manifestations: that includes manhwa and manhua, as well as other forms of comic media today. We actually turn to the community in many cases asking, “What titles would YOU like to see in English on our service?” This is part of our community involvement effort, which is, by nature, community-centered rather than big-name-titles centered.
You also have a few manga from major companies such as Kodansha (Open Sesame, Gut’s). What’s it been like reaching out to them, or is just TORICO?
TORICO has over 10 years of history selling manga online. It is a continuous growing and rather prosperous environment we’ve nested ourselves into. We have good relations with most (if not all) manga publishers in Japan. Our newer services are built to grow on the same environment, and at best we try to leverage and bring additional merits to collaborating with anyone that sees the future of the manga market globally in a similar way we do, independent, or corporate.
Is the content all there? For example, I see you have stuff such as Damsel in Debt or How Misuzu Got a Leg Up, and aren’t those kinda mature?
We’re nearly there. Phase 1 of our development consisted of bringing a free-to read experience for anything below the Mature regulation. We’ve got quite a lot to offer, and the 18+ Cap will unleash as we release the next few major functions for our users. Stay tuned!
It’s a free service, but is that going to change as the months go on? Or is it far too early to say?
We are very much invested in open access, and don’t think a paywall is where this type of project needs to be behind. That being said, as a business, we are contemplating different methods that would help deliver content sooner (than normally scheduled) to our users that would have a reasonable fee attached.
I think the big hook is the language conversion for titles, as they can go from ENG to JP, or vice versa for example. Was this an idea already planned out or while during development it came up?
A very big part of my childhood memory was my English learning journey started back in 1997. I couldn’t speak a word of English back then. However, I showed off to my new friends the Japanese version of Pokemon. In return, they taught me how to play Magic the Gathering, and my writing scores went up pretty fast after that. Learning from entertainment is just what I love and Manga.club fits to that scheme perfectly with the culture, and the people putting it together. We’re very conscious of the fact that the instant language conversion is a useful tool for those learning Japanese, reaching in-depth to the original creation, and seeking value to manga than just the first layer.
Are all the titles being localized by Manga.Club?
A good majority, with a great amount of pages completed by contributors that have an excellent ability to translate or typeset and to localize manga into a new language. These are awesome, incredibly talented people we work with on a daily basis to get new works released on Manga.club.
What do you think will be the biggest challenge moving forward as the service continues?
We’re growing, but we’re still small, but this is an unfortunate reality for not only manga publishing services. One of the biggest challenges for us right now is publicizing new, official releases, and it is something we’re working on daily. There is a real benefit in supporting official releases of manga – only through legitimate sales do the artists make any money – and we strive to share this with our readers while expanding our service in design to fit the tone of this message.
Finally, what’s coming down the pipeline for the service that you can share?
We’re almost ready to roll out a better user experience. That is, soon our project will be able to follow reading histories and suggest something a user’s never read before. Another item would be a firm release calendar and notifications to track the series the readers follow, and these are prioritized based on the messages we’ve received from the reading community. New titles are steadily coming in, so I hope in the meantime everyone will check out our hard work on these titles, share your reviews about them, and even better, tell us what you want to read next.
Interview has been edited a bit for clarity.