Rumiko (Inuyasha, Ranma 1/2) Takahashi’s new manga series will be released in weekly installments simultaneously in the US and Japan. And the US version? It will be available as a free webcomic.

Instantaneous release of the manga in both English and Japanese is all by itself pretty big news.

That the business model for the English version looks a lot like the business model behind every successful grassroots webcomic in existence (read it for free online right now, maybe buy the books later) is also pretty interesting to me. Viz, and Takahashi, are big enough names to have played this a lot more carefully — they could have put up a subscription wall, for example, or they could have created some kind of DRM-heavy downloadable package for iTunes or whatever … or they could have just not done this at all, and published the English version at their own traditional pace. Big comics publishers usually don’t put out important, much-anticipated work by their most famous talents out there on the Internet for free. So yeah. This is huge.

That VIZ has seemingly adopted the model pioneered by the webcomics community isn’t exactly proof that, um, “webcomics thinking,” or whatever you want to call it, is taking over the industry. But it’s definitely a step in that direction.

I signed up for email notifications. Didn’t see an RSS feed. Once the comics are live (April 22, according to the homepage of the site), we’ll all find out just how cool (or not cool) their presentation of the material actually turns out to be. For example: I hope they don’t use some weird proprietary Flash interface.

Via Good Comics for Kids, but the press release itself has much more info.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Business, Webcomics (Non-MT). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.