Join the Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club! (If You Have an iPad)

Get ready, Osamu Tezuka fans, because the god of manga’s considerable body of work is now available on an iPad near you. In English. That’s right, Tezuka Productions and a Japanese software company named SOBA Project Inc. have created the Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club app, which makes available 62 volumes of the beloved mangaka’s comics to manga fans in the form of a cloud-based subscription service. It allows users to read through pages and pages of “Astro Boy” and “Black Jack” from the comfort of wherever they and their iPads happen to be. And Android device users need not feel left out, because the plan is to port the Tezuka Magazine app to that mobile operating system during this coming fall and winter. For iPad users, the app is free, but the service is US $9.99 per month. But for that fee you get access to as many Tezuka comics as you can handle, and to 39 episodes of what Tezuka Productions and SOBA are calling animated “Black Jack” “Motion Manga”. So now, it’s possible to easily carry around an entire digital library by one of the greatest comics artists in history. In Japanese and English. Pretty cool. In fact, about the only downside we can see right now is versions of Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club in languages other than English are only under consideration and not definitely planned (Mainichi Daily News – Tezuka Osamu Magazine Club) The app is available on iTunes.