Review: Viz Media iPad App

Medium: Digital Manga Application
Publisher: Viz Media
Release Date: Nov. 2, 2010 (North America)
App Store Link

The first thing that popped into my head when I heard of the Viz app was, honestly, "aw, man, another discrete app? I already have half a screen of various comic reading apps!" Thankfully, the app more than makes up for this minor complaint, as I will outline in this review. The reason for this appears to be that Viz wants to tie the user up with a vizmedia.com account rather than putting its inventory on one of the other comic book marketplaces — presumably in order to collect market data and directly monitor usage.

Signing up for such an account is the first thing you have to do in order to view any of the manga, adding yet another login and password to your life. Thankfully the process is very swift, asking a minimum of questions and requiring only an e-mail activation to complete.

The layout of the app itself follows the normal mold for iPad comic apps that has now been established by comiXology, with a grand total of three viewable tabs, one each for the store, your library of content, and the settings. The app feels greatly streamlined with very few settings available to the user, although it must be noted that I did not find myself wanting for anything and found the app easy to navigate.

The library itself is also very streamlined, with six titles available, each with one to two volumes available at present. These titles are Viz's biggest, such as One Piece, Dragon Ball and Naruto. Each series also has the first chapter available to preview for free, which is a welcome feature. The title-browsing interface is very simplistic and I hope that this is developed further as more titles are added — while the interface works fine for six series it could quickly become cluttered and difficult to navigate as more are added.

As a gift, the first volume of Death Note is available to download for free to users who sign up for new accounts (at the time of writing). Downloading is as simple as pressing the appropriate link and letting the data come to you — however sadly this is marked with a few problems. First of all, there is no downloads menu — the only indication that anything is happening is a sluggish blue bar pasted at the bottom of the volume cover which you can sit and watch creep across the screen. You cannot view a volume that is being downloaded, something that is easily possible on other (sadly less scrupulous) manga viewers. You are still free to navigate around the app, but the experience is noticeably slower and there is a lack of anything else to actually look at while you wait. Exiting the app causes the download to reset, which is irritating but is perhaps more due to the fact that iPads are still running iOS3.2-OS4.2 and multitasking will not be available until some time in November according to Apple. Re-entering the app automatically restarts the download, which is a nice touch, but as downloads don't show up in your library until they are finished and there is no downloads pane, it’s a rather long-winded process to determine how your download is doing. For my part, I went and played with my cats while the download was ongoing.

One thing I want to quickly praise here is the error messages. This sounds like an odd thing to mention, but each time I ran into an error with the app (not often), the message presented was clear, direct, and to the point. When I bought and downloaded Volume 1 of Bleach to test the purchasing system there was an error with the download. The message that appeared reassured me that all was well, nothing was lost, and I only had to restart the app. This extra effort is greatly appreciated, as when errors of this sort occur it can be bewildering as to where your money and content have gone.

So, enough of all of this infrastructure stuff — what about the actual comic-reading part of the app?

First of all, the image quality looks fine. Even when zoomed in the pages look clear and legible with no artifacts in sight. Holding the iPad in landscape mode creates a two-page spread that mimics a physical manga volume, while holding it portrait gives you a view of a larger single page. Both work well and are comfortable to read — the biggest compliment I can give is that I happily read the entire first volume of Death Note and Bleach with no major issues.

One nice thing that made me laugh is that the generic "you are reading the wrong way!" advisory message you find on the last page of manga volumes pops up when you try and turn the first page as if you would a western book. These touches show Viz has been thoughtful when constructing the app.

There are still small niggles with the presentation, however — reading landscape introduces a small time lag in-between page turns as the app renders the next two pages ahead of you, and skipping to a distant portion of the volume causes the app to tick over for a noticeable amount of time before displaying the desired pages. However, It should be noted that this behavior was only apparent when I stress tested the application.

Another small complaint with the manga viewing, at least with Bleach, is the massive size of the spine margins present on the pages — in either landscape or portrait view they take up a not-insignificant portion of the screen and once you see them you can't help noticing that they are there. Cropping these would really benefit the reading experience.

Prolonged reading was comfortable on the eyes, but sadly not on the arms — the iPad is still just a little too heavy to be fully comfortable as a reading device, but this is a fault of the hardware and not Viz.

A quick note here on the price: US $5 a volume at present. This feels, to me at least, a very fair price to charge with the caveat that I expect purchases to carry over onto other digital platforms as they become available. I see no reason why not as your purchases are tied to the Vizmedia.com account you have to create when you start using the app.

All in all, the app does what it says on the proverbial tin, in an approachable and streamlined manner. I have no real complaints that would prevent my continuing to use the app, other than a frank request that they port it to other territories ASAP — if this was available natively in the UK I would gladly use it to finally buy and read One Piece. The series is just too big at present to buy in physical format due to the sheer bulk of the books.

I hope Viz continues to improve the app; adding more and a greater variety titles would be a great start, but adding in community interaction such as forums, reviews and such would really boost interactivity and provide something to do while waiting for downloads to complete. For now, though, it’s a great start.

[Highly Recommended]

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Note: This review is of the first publicly available version of the Viz Media iPad app, and thus the app itself is liable to change via updates and patches. Please also note that this app is only available at present within the US and Canada — being in the UK I had to obtain the app via gray market means which, while relatively easy, should only be attempted if you are fully aware of the possible drawbacks of such an approach.

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Review: Comicloud, vol.1 no.1 (Digital Manga Anthology)

Medium: Digital Manga Anthology
Publisher: Bookloud
Release Date: July 28, 2010 (Worldwide)
Kindle marketplace link

I would not have known about the existence of the digital-only manga anthology Comicloud if not for @animeresearch on Twitter. So, all due respect to him for alerting me to it. Comicloud is published via the Amazon Kindle online marketplace, and as I have both an iPhone and an iPad with the Kindle application installed I was instantly curious.

First of all, I wanted to get all discussion of the application itself out of the way. Buying and downloading the eBook is seamless; the application takes you to the Kindle marketplace and back again straight away after a purchase. Downloading the book, even on multiple devices, is utterly painless. However, viewing the magazine itself has its issues — zooming into the pages is rather cumbersome and once zoomed in (especially on the iPad) you have to revert the page to its native size to turn the page. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that each page is shown at less than the full viewable area of your device so you get massive margins around each page.

Now, onto the anthology itself. The file size is rather dinky (9 MB, to be exact). While this is great for quick downloading on the move, the image quality suffers from this small size as zooming in even a little on the pages makes image compression readily visible. The size of the images that make up the anthology are rather small, resulting in massive margins around the pages on the iPad and noticeable amounts of unused space even on the smaller iPhone. This fact, combined with the previously mentioned issue of being unable to turn pages while zoomed in, makes reading the magazine a chore.

Another much more irritating issue is that both the translation and the editing feel lazy. The former is at least functional despite its poor use of punctuation, but the typesetting of the dialogue and sound effects feels very poorly handled and is detrimental to enjoyment of the magazine. All the text is presented plainly, sound effects outside of speech bubbles are untranslated and there is nothing to differentiate between sound effects and dialogue that are placed inside bubbles. The actual presentation of the content feels like an afterthought.

But what about this content then?

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Quadrifoglio 2 (By Takeshi Okamoto)

The longest of the individual contributions, Quadriofoglio follows the genius mechanic Yotsuba (no relation to the adorable character from the manga of the same name) as she joins a university car racing club and helps out at her family garage. I must admit I had severe flashbacks to Initial D while reading this due to the very impressive, photo-realistic drawings of the cars, and thankfully the people didn't look half bad either and were an engaging bunch to read about. The main problem I have with the series is a lack of any feeling of motion either within or between the separate panels, making it feel more like a series of stills than an ongoing, unfolding drama. In a manga about things that go “Vrooom!” around a track very fast this saps some of the fun out of it. Still, it’s a fun read and I would be I happy to see how it develops in further chapters. Searching for information of its predecessor (Quadrifoglio) has left me empty-handed, sadly.

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Kurogane (By Nanami Shizika)

So, let me outline the premise here: loser guy meets hot dense girl out of nowhere and has to live with her, and she inexplicably likes him. If you just passed out as a result of how generic that sounds, then you know how I felt reading it. The series even ticks the additional otaku bait box of having a trap turn up in the first 10 pages. Sadly the clunky translation hurts this series, making the main expository pages of this chapter read like a garbled mess and so I’m not sure if the premise has anything going for it. The art looks serviceable enough (especially the breasts of the main female character), but in general the whole package is woefully forgettable. It does however have the best sound effect in the anthology: "Hug!!" Two exclamation marks! Wowzah.

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Nobunagirl (By Taro Matsumoto)

Time for brutal honesty: Nobunagirl has terrible, awful art and is hard to take seriously. Both lineart and shading are all over the place and panels that should be badass inspire more laughter than awe. The plot jumps from a demon infested Warring States era featuring Oda Nobunaga into an even weirder sci-fi setting which has very little thought or care put into it. The last panel is so bizarre it has to be seen to be believed: a young girl riding on the back of a terribly drawn ripoff of the alien from ... Alien (1979). I think I uttered "Are you serious?" while reading it. Skip this.

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Kago Mania (By Shintaro Kago)

For me, the promise of content from the surreal mind of Shintaro Kago (who is called a "fantastic idea cartoonist" in his own bio) was the "killer app" that pushed me over the edge when buying this anthology. Imagine my surprise when the content supplied had much higher quality drawings than his usual fare, but then also imagine my disappointment when I discovered that he had only four pages in the magazine! Each page is a single, full-page image of a surreal idea given flight, and while I enjoyed them, it was all over too soon. What a shame.

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Overall, I feel conflicted about Comicloud. While I love the idea and dearly wish for it to find an audience, the content just isn't there yet. Over half of the 80 pages delivered are skippable and the rest feel cheapened by the small image size and poor typesetting.

Personally I am looking forward to the next few issues to see how the magazine develops, and hope that the hard work and enthusiasm that the editors clearly have for their product pays off.

[Bad]

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This review is based on the Kindle release, purchased by the reviewer.

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Digital manga isn't just for the pirates

You may have already noticed, but there is a lot of hullabaloo on the Internet at present about the presence of illegal manga scanlation aggregation sites (we won't link to them here for the sake of integrity) as well as the recent formation of an industry coalition to fight this particular practice. One response to this, and one I have personally echoed in my own vehement and nerdy voice, is that there needs to be a legal equivalent to fill the obvious market that exists for digital manga. There have already been some steps in this direction, as you will have seen from my review of the Astro Boy Magazine (Soon to be provided in iBooks, I hear!), but this is only available for Apple platforms in selected countries at present.

I want to outline how a digital marketplace for manga would make me a more lucrative consumer for the manga companies.

The first problem that can be solved by digital distribution is availability. There are two parts to this, because I can't help overcomplicating things.

Part number one: Retail availability can be a double-edged sword. Every few weeks I make a circuit of the two remaining manga booksellers that exist where I live and pick up things that interest me. This has led to some wonderful impulse purchases I would not have otherwise made, but as time has gone on this practice has declined just as the available space for manga has shrunk within these stores. More often it poses an issue — you see fragmented series missing volumes you wish to purchase, or only the very latest volumes of something you may be interested in. Ordering in copies can, depending on the service, be a royal pain and the time until delivery is often worse than shopping online.

Talking about online, these same issues are amplified in the digital bookstore, where ordering out-of-stock items is often a lot less transparent and impulse purchases are all but non-existent. I don't know about you, but most of the suggestions that Amazon offers me on its front page are for books I have already purchased from other vendors. Still, this shows that their system works.

With a digital product there is (barring a freakish technical fault) no such thing as “out of stock”, or “available in 7-14 weeks” — just a digital file on a server that is waiting for me to fork over my cash. While you lose some of the romance and physicality of a brick-and-mortar store, the instant and obvious availability of stock makes for a much easier purchasing experience overall.

The second part of the availability issue comes in when a manga is no longer in print, or hard to find. You may end up having to pick up volumes from many different places, both from physical bookstores and online counterparts, and trying to order unavailable volumes can be a lottery. I’m sure many of you can think of a time you have heard an exciting series described to you by a friend, enemy, or podcast with the soul-crushing words “Oh, but it’s hard to find now” appended on the end. Wouldn’t it be nice for there to still be an option available to obtain the series while still ensuring that the publisher feels the love?

For a personal example of this problem, I had a hell of time picking up Buddha recently. While not strictly scarce, the wildly fluctuating availability of individual volumes in the UK made picking it up for a reasonable (i.e. RRP or less) price a hellish endeavor. I ended up ordering it from four separate places, one of which was a bookstore in Croydon who did mail-order but had no e-mail and so I had to phone the (very pleasant) shop assistant.

How nice would it have been to simply press a big button on a digital delivery service labeled "Buy Series"? I would have done that in a heartbeat.

A digital option would also have cut out a big additional cost and inconvenience of manga purchasing — physical delivery. Instead of waiting 3-5 working days and/or paying a varying sum for delivery, the manga can come direct through your Internet connection at minimal cost. This immediacy would allow for an even greater volume of impulse purchases — something I am already highly susceptible on the iTunes Store and on Steam.

The next, and main, reason is amazingly boring and a bit obvious: Manga made from dead trees takes up space. Once you start a collection, the amount of space needed tends to skyrocket. I currently own the first 6 volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist, and while I would love to continue reading the series, I have no space to house it. I already have two full bookcases, and purchasing a long series like FMA would cause me no end of headaches trying to find a home for it. Note that this does not mean that I will stop buying physical manga volumes, but I have to be more selective about what I buy, especially longer series.

This leads me to a secondary item — while I enjoy reading Fullmetal Alchemist, I am not desperately chomping at the bit to devote the not-trivial amount of money and shelf space to the rest of the series. With this current state of affairs, I have no (legal) method of reading the series and the publisher is missing out on the money I would happily pay them for a digital version.

These are all issues with the current model that can be remedied by a digital marketplace, and would not displace my existing desire to buy physical copies. I haven’t even started to talk about ways that manga could be enriched and enhanced in a digital marketplace, but that is within the scope of a different article.

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Editor's Note: Digital Manga Publishing is currently running eManga, a site offering digital distribution of manga through a rental system.

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