Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club (English only in iPad)

[Fuzzy Pickles!]

Just subscribed to Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club. The good news is that the subscription goes for both the English and Japanese version of the club, so fans have access to everything the Japanese has (although as said before, a lot of things in Japanese are not present in the English version).

Edit: The mangas are read right to left, so they haven't been flipped. Kinda weird for me, but it is good to see nonetheless. Also should fix the issue with Astro Boy going from left to right like it did in the Dark Horse comics.

[Tetsuwan Penguin]

JThe mangas are read right to left, so they haven't been flipped. Kinda weird for me, but it is good to see nonetheless. Also should fix the issue with Astro Boy going from left to right like it did in the Dark Horse comics.

After reading all of Blackjack and a few other Mangas from Vertical I'm used to the right to left stuff (not to mention Hebrew prayer books....) No big deal....

[Fuzzy Pickles!]

Few Tezuka fans can deny the lack of Tezuka contents in English, especially digital and online. The 2003 Astro Boy series and 1989 Kimba the White Lion dubs were horrible with no option for a Japanese release, many manga and animes have yet to see a release oversea (Jungle Emperor Leo's manga has been translated into French, but surprisingly hasn't seen an English release) along other things. All of these things contribute to Tezuka's relative obscurity in the present day. Its why when contents from Tezuka come along there, there's much rejoicing because it gives people the opportunity to be exposed to Tezuka. Being curious about the manga itself, I decided to sign up for a month subscription to Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club on Ipad despite the mostly negative reaction from those who have experienced it.

Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club is (supposed to) provide a free weekly magazine for free viewers to sample. Sometimes, a Black Jack volumes shows up, other times, chapters on Astro Boy appears. When it comes to flipped mangas (like Astro Boy), pages can be turned to a left to right format instead of the right and left format (like Black Jack). Its okay for sampling Tezuka products, but the app does not deliver on providing weekly issue every week; they seem to appear every two week which can be problematic.

After purchasing a month subscription, the subscription goes into auto-renewal (which can be turned off by going to the iTunes section, selection your Apple ID, going to Subscription, and removing the auto-renew option), meaning that for every month subscribed to Tezuka Osamu Magazine club, $9.99 will be taken out of the balance.

One of the biggest selling point of Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club is that the app advertises that almost all of the English Tezuka mangas are avaialble digitally. However, anyone with some knowledge on Tezuka would know that this is false advertisement as plenty of Tezuka contents are missing. Princess Knight, Metropolis, Book of Human Insects, Swallowing the Earth, Nextworld, Lost World, Crime & Punishment and Ayako are missing from the list along with seven volumes of Black Jack and six volumes of Phoenix. While it is nice that the 1st volume of Phoenix and the 1st volume of Adolf can be read for only $9.99 since both are very hard to find at a reasonable price in print (depending on reading speed), it doesn't completely make up for the fact that a lot of Tezuka contents are missing and should have been added by now.

Fortunately, the subscription goes for the Japanese version as well, so those who know enough Japanese to read mangas will be in luck as a lot more contents exist in Japanese (and that's an understatement, I'll get the list later). However, this will be mostly useless to most people as said majority will have little to no knowledge of the Japanese language unless of course someone just wants to look at the artwork. Its also cool that both version of Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club features Japanese covers for stories available.

Unfortunately, this is where all the positives ends. When actually reading a story, a host of problems emerge. First off, when reading the stories, most of the stories will have at least one page of contents that is blacked out when reading vertically. Sure reading it horizontally fixes the problem, but it begs the question of why it has to exist in the first place. Another problem is that while Viz Media iPad app features the ability to zoom in, no such option exist for the Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club app. Those who have vision problems will find contents in the story difficult to read. There's also no option to quickly skip pages, so unless you're wise enough to bookmark where you left off (which btw, they don't tell you where it is, you have to touch the tag on the left of the iPad), you have to flip pages by pages to find your stopping point. As you can imagine, its very repetitive and can grate on the mind. Flipping from vertical to horizontal takes some times and occasionally, even crash the app. Flipped mangas also require turning the page right to left, making it even more confusing as to why they did this for the weekly free stories but not the volumes.

There's also the motion manga. Surprisingly, the English version version has more contents than the Japanese version, but it doesn't matter much since a Japanese could access both versions anyway and the voices are in Japanese regardless. However, the motion manga doesn't feel very inspiring and looks tacked on in a poor attempt to differentiate itself from the rest of the manga apps out there.

There is a website for Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club in Japanese but the iPad app is the only option for English speakers. What's worse, contacting them is virtually impossible without using translation, which are of questionable quality when translating from English to Japanese. Even worse when subscribing to the app, the message advertisting its claim is presented in horribly translated English that makes it obvious that little effort was put into the translation; which is a sign that this app was not the app it promised to be (as if the missing contents from the English version wasn't apparent enough).

Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club is an app with great potential. The app, if done right, would be able to unify the small Tezuka fan base and help build a niche that others may join. But as of right now, the app works more as a deflection of potential fans than as inviting. Its a shame really, because its hard to recommend this to even diehard Tezuka fans.

I do know one thing; unless Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club makes serious improvements in the English version of the app (and to a lesser extend, the Japanese version as well), they've lost me as a customer.

[AprilSeven]

Thank you for this valuable and very well thought-out review and comments.

It's a shame that they just don't seem to understand how much more they could make if they'd only open up Tezuka's works up to the world outside of Japan.

And I'm not surprised to hear the app is buggy. I considered subscribing to this, but unless they provide you with a pdf (do they?) - something that I can put on my computer to read - or print out if wanted do . . . what good is it? As long as I have my eeensy weensy Ipad/Ipod I can read my manga?

[Fuzzy Pickles!]

Thank you for this valuable and very well thought-out review and comments.

It's a shame that they just don't seem to understand how much more they could make if they'd only open up Tezuka's works up to the world outside of Japan.

And I'm not surprised to hear the app is buggy. I considered subscribing to this, but unless they provide you with a pdf (do they?) - something that I can put on my computer to read - or print out if wanted do . . . what good is it? As long as I have my eeensy weensy Ipad/Ipod I can read my manga?

French and Italian seems to fare decently in regards to contents manga-wise. Of course the English audience gets dumped on a lot.

Sadly, I doubt we're going to get much more Tezuka content than what we already have, at least not until a new Astro Boy release. The 2003 series was our chance to get Tezuka noticeable around the world and bring in a big crowd to him and it failed because of the botched dub and the poor marketing (at least in North America). Now Tezuka lies in obscurity here and its safe to assume that Tezuka Production won't be making a large effort to get Tezuka products here for a long time.

That's where we as the fans step in. We're pretty much the only thing keeping Tezuka's memories alive in English-speaking countries. Since no one else is going to do the work for us, its up to us to bring the contents outside of Japan. The reason why we're getting Unico in full color is because of the fans push for it.

Part of the reason why I'm learning Japanese is to help contribute to making at least some Tezuka contents accessible. Maybe try to get open fansubs (not the lock-in subs you would see for some shows on YouTube) for series like the 1963 and 2003 Astro Boy series and contribute to subs on Viki for Jungle Emperor Leo (1989 series). It'll be a long time before I can get some subbing done, but I do intend on doing it.

To answer your last question, no, they don't have pdf nor can you print them out.