Major publisher Shueisha and tech company Hatena have teamed up to launch a new online manga service called Mangano, drawing on the expertise that the Jump Plus team have built up in their digital manga endeavors.
This comes at a time when Shueisha are not only expanding their online presence, but also seeing some of their biggest hits come from digital publication. Just yesterday, the Weekly Shonen Jump publisher announced that they would offer training to game creators and other professionals through the Shueisha Game Creators CAMP. What’s more, digital manga Kaiju No. 8 was the highest selling first volume of any new series last year, proving that series don’t need to originate from paper magazines to be successful.
With this in mind, it’s no surprise that something like Mangano was on the cards. Looking a little closer at the details, however, it might be positioning itself as a competitor to the likes of Pixiv and Twitter: it’s essentially an online portal service that allows creators to collate, update, and upload their works. The aforementioned sites have long since been the places to do this, but Shueisha is offering a more specialized service that also works in tandem with others: you can organize your profile to link out to different places as well as publish directly on the site.
Mangano even has powerful moderation tools that allow you to filter out bad comments and monetization features, albeit with the host site taking a portion of the profits. That might make for a more pleasant reading experience and allow independent creators to earn some money from their endeavors without relying on big publishers.
Finally, Jump Plus’ involvement lends the project an aura of expertise. They’ve developed a number of services and competitions targeted at rookies in the past, such as the ‘indies’ initiative and Million Tag.
Could the next big mangaka come from Mangano, then? It’s certainly not a slim possibility.
Mangano is open now. You can create a profile for free via the official website.