Tyler Davis
Digital is the future of art and pop entertainment, at least some may claim. While it may not be quite the all-consuming monolith many claim, digital has worked to make access to art so much easier. While streaming and digital marketplaces have bolstered the worlds of film, television, and gaming, comics have struggled in that regard due to the fact that digital comics, for the most part, have struggled with pricing.
Even streaming services, such as Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite have priced themselves up at a level that makes little sense for the way comic readers engage with the medium. Most comic readers engage with more than one publisher and universe, making Comixology Unlimited the best comics related service on the market, barring the fact that Unlimited’s interface is a total mess. As of 3 days ago, Viz Media entered the streaming world with a brand-new Viz Manga app that I’ve had the luxury of using and reading from.
Much like the Shonen Jump streamer app, this new service is rife with value. At $1.99 per month price point, you are in turn receiving tens of thousands of manga chapters from the publisher. From Junji Ito to slice of life series, the app genuinely has it all. I found myself bouncing around from highly popular series such as Komi Can’t Communicate to series that barely made it past two volumes such as What A Wonderful World. Even modern classics like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End are available to download and read.
However, the app still has some kinks to work out. Obviously its still fresh, and some series are missing chunks of chapters that the company is working hard at adding. Navigation is slick for the most part, besides for the fact that this app also doubles as a general Viz market place, meaning that manga not part of your subscription gets lumped in alongside the stuff your paying for. This can make it hard to tell what exactly it is you can read.
Considering that most of the books you have to pay for can be read with the Shonen Jump subscription service. Simple integration between the two apps would solve this issue easily. Jumping back and forth between the two is grating, and making things readable on the main Viz hub is a simple quality of life improvement I can see being added in the future.
As of right now, there are some reading limits to account for the services low price. Users have a download limit of up to one hundred chapters per device alongside a reading limit of one hundred chapters per day. Considering most series aren’t that long, it’s a more than gracious limit, however I am curious as to why it exists in the first place. Seeing as how the app is barely a week old, it could be a technical issue, or the company could be aiming to introduce more subscription tiers that allow for greater chapter access. Upon first glance that may sound predatory, but one hundred chapters is a lot as is. Allowing the consumer to spend based on their own rates of consumption is extremely healthy, and something more services should pick up in the future as long as they keep it as ethically sound as Viz has. The downloads will auto-delete after seven days to ensure data space is as lean as possible.
The app also noticeably lacks a panel by panel reader, but these very minor issues do not get in the way of the insane value at hand. The Viz app has so many stellar reads on it that I’d still recommend supporting it in its infantile stages, but the service does have a couple more steps it needs to take to be on par with some of the best in terms of its structure.