Summary
VIZ Media announced yesterday that their manga app has now added Marvel titles to the service. This is part of the collaboration between the giants of two distinct sides of thebiggest comic book industries in the world, which began in 2022 when they combined the superpowered legacy of various Marvel heroes and the storytelling form of manga. This yielded a number of successful manga titles that feature Marvel superheroes in a way that they hadn’t been seen before.
Now, users of the VIZ Manga app can read various Marvel titles, fromSpider-Man: Fake Redby Yusuke Osawa (Star Wars: The Mandalorian: The Manga), toWolverine: Snikt!by Tsutomu Nihei (Knights of Sidonia), and users of the app have an exciting one-month promotion waiting for them.
The Marvel Titles in Question
What’s the Promotion?
Among the aforementioned Spider-Man and Wolverine manga now available on the VIZ Manga app, users will also be able to enjoySpider-Man: Octo-Girlby ;Deadpool: Samuraiby Sanshiro Kusama and Hikaru Uesugi, which was originally released on Shonen Jump+ and featured a cameo appearance fromMy Hero Academia’sAll Might;Marvel’s Secret ReversebyYu-Gi-Oh!creator Kazuki Takahashi, with the highly anticipatedX-Men: The Manga: Remasteredby Hiroshi Higuchi coming to the service this Fall.
Marvel Comics: A Manga Tribute, an artbook featuring illustrations of Marvel characters from over twenty manga artists such asLegend of Zelda: Twilight Princessauthor Akira Himekawa;Trigunauthor Yasuhiro Nightow,One-Punch Manmanga illustrator Yusuke Murata; Marvel comic book artist Peach Momoko, and several others, was released among the aforementioned titles in July 2023.
Getting the Manga Treatment
Worlds Collide
Marvel and VIZ’s collaboration to combine comics and manga is part of a growing trend mostly influenced by the overwhelming growth of the anime and manga industries in the latter part of the 2010s leading into the 2020s. That being said; however, the first time Marvel explored this concept was over 20 years ago with the Marvel Mangaverse (Earth-2301) which ran from 2000 to 2002 and had a sequel in 2006. Almost 30 years before that, Hulk got the manga treatment in 1970, so this isn’t a new concept; however, this is the first time this collision of worlds is taking place at a time when anime and manga have become globally mainstream.
While considered two highly influential realms in the world of sequential comics, western comics and manga have grown in vastly different ways, with the latter rapidly overshadowing the former in recent times; however, several manga artists and stories have been influenced by comics in interesting ways, with Kohei Horikoshi’sMy Hero Academiaserving as a node exhibiting the nexus between American comics and manga.Suicide Squad ISEKAI, an anime project based onvarious characters from the DC universeis set to be released sometime this year.
