The Digital Comic Association, which includes 39 Japanese manga publishers, has opened an official manga portal for North America. This service, called JManga Portal, started on August 17, 2011.

“The Digital Comic Association was officially established in September 2006. One of our main themes is online business development. Naturally, we thought we’d need to communicate a variety of information worldwide as well as in Japan. So we’ve had the provision of digital comics overseas in mind right from the start.”

“First of all, our goal was to make Japanese manga widely known among English speakers. So far, manga have been popular not only in North America, but worldwide. However, with printed versions, the range of manga that are profitable commercially is limited to some extent. But Japanese manga are extremely diverse, so one of our main aims is to enable people to look at as many different genres as possible. In that sense, we’d like to present lots of Japanese manga that haven’t been readily available before now.”

JManga already offers over 100 titles, including selections in the Shonen, Shojo, Seinen, and Josei categories. Manga streaming is available for $1.20 per episode. The viewer system, with its ability to show individual frames and pages in line with a story, makes JManga very different from pirate sites.

“Whenever possible, we’ve included the ability to switch between Japanese and English in the viewer. A growing number of people from overseas study and work in Japan, and many people say that what got them interested in learning Japanese was manga and anime. We think it’s very important to have text in both English and Japanese, so people in North America can learn Japanese while reading the manga, and get to know more about Japan and its culture.”

“We need to have a lot of readers, so it’s important for us to offer more titles, and to announce new ones at the right time. Old titles alone don’t make for a very attractive site, so another of our aims is to offer new titles as quickly as possible. Also, as this is an English portal, most users will be in North America. But English also makes manga accessible to readers worldwide, so we expect to expand our target market.”

JManga also plans to provide a full range of original content services unique to this official site, including author interviews and “behind-the-scenes” features on production.

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