MANGA Plus was announced about two months ago, with its Spanish version launching late last month. Now that both versions have been around for a bit, I decided to see what — if anything — has changed.
The Online Viewer
What was at the forefront of my mind was the two-page spreads. As I showed in my original article, on computers, MANGA Plus defaulted to showing two pages at a time. This made some images awkward or even ruin them. Well, I first decided to check out Blue Exorcist.
Well, that’s a good start.
Yay! The Gate is shown in full gory glory!
So, then my attention turned to Boruto. And, uh, here’s where it gets weird. When I first revisited Boruto, the opening title page was corrected. But then randomly throughout the chapter, instead of seeing two pages at once, I would only see one. And no, it had nothing to do with where the ads are placed. (They are in the reader every so often when you turn the page.) So by the time we got to the ruined birthday scene, the odd number of pages led to the wrong pages being side-by-side. Later, the chapter evened itself after another solo page. But when I went back later to take a screenshot, it didn’t happen at all! Same thing happened with Claymore: some solo pages messed up the pagecount and ruined some spreads, but later, I had no issue. I even tried a private browsing window and a different browser entirely, but I could not replicate the issue.
I finally got it to happen in a completely different manga. Here’s an example of a random solo page in Arata Primal: The New Primative.
On the other hand, when I read the first chapter of Bakuman., I had no single pages pop up. I don’t know if this is caused by some random software glitches, if it’s dependent on where the scans originate from (Viz vs MANGA Plus, original Japanese files that are edited vs English rescans), or something else entirely, but at least some of MANGA Plus’ titles are avoiding ruining the layout of entire chapters.
Whatever it is, the number of pages shown isn’t the only weird thing that happens on the site. When I went to look at the titles, this is what popped up:
As you can see, there are a lot of duplicates. At first glance, I thought maybe this was due to these older titles adding old chapters slowly (what MANGA Plus calls “re-edition”) versus members having entire access to the back catalog. But the duplicates are the titles that are available in both English and Spanish. The upper corner says English, but this refers to the language of the menu. Choosing English or Spanish for the menu language automatically selects the corresponding language for the manga, but you can also choose to see the other. In English mode, unclicking Spanish though led to this:
Yep, the site doesn’t fully update, so you get the wrong cover/sample images for manga. The same thing happens if you choose Spanish and then add English manga. If you click on a series then go back, the page will correctly update so that the covers and the titles match. Otherwise, ignore the cover images; the series name is correct.
The iOS app does not seem to have these issues. I was disappointed though to still see that landscape mode won’t show two pages at once though. That being said, it feels like MANGA Plus may be prioritizing the app over the website. This may not be a surprise considering the smartphone and tablet market is exploding while computer sales are stagnating as well as manga chapters make great quick breaktime fillers when out-and-about.
Organizing the Bilingual Manga
Twenty-seven titles launched in Spanish last month, and that number is stable. I imagine Spanish readers are looking forward to the day when manga like Blue Exorcist are available in their native language, but English speakers are probably jealous that a couple of titles like Reborn! are Spanish-exclusive. I did find it interesting that the same manga goes by different titles depending on the language: the Spanish version keeps the Japanese title of Ao no Flag while English fans will read it under its translated title Blue Flag.
Obviously, for a short title like this (and with the titles being relatively close in alphabetical order), either way, the manga was easy to find. If the service expands though, I wonder if more titles will diverge and will kind of muddy up the list of titles and/or make things confusing. For bilingual readers — or even those that just want to read exclusives — I wish there was a way to see at a glance which listing is for English and which is for Spanish. I guess I expected that readers would click on a title and then choose between English and Spanish rather than a combined list.
Final Thoughts
So, while MANGA Plus is still facing some issues on their website, I am impressed that the Spanish version launched right within their original window instead of facing delays. It’s still an ambitious project and at a price point that can’t be beat, so honestly, it could be worse. I still haven’t used the app or site much because I prefer VIZ/Shonen Jump, but I do hope that fans continue to support it so that the service can be the best it can be.