Mangamo is a subscription service for fans of manga, or comics and graphic novels originating in Japan. It launched this year and already has over 300 titles available on the service, working with over 15 publishers to bring titles like Seven Deadly Sins and Attack on Titan to fans digitally.
We chatted exclusively with the co-founder and executive editor of the service, Dallas Middaugh, who has a lot of experience with comics and graphic novels. He previously taught a class on publishing graphic novels at NYU, and he has been involved with over 2000 published works over the past couple of decades.
Dallas told us which titles are on the streaming service, and he also chatted with us about a few other things that will likely be of interest to comic book enthusiasts. To hear the audio portion of the interview, click the podcast player below!
Literary Joe: I know a little bit about your history Penguin and Random House and stuff, but I'm curious if you can summarize your career trajectory for us and what led you to found this new app?
Dallas Middaugh: So I've been working in manga publishing in the US for 20 years now. I got my start back in 2000 with Viz and since then went on to work with several different publishers. I co-founded Seven Seas and helped to set up the Delray Manga and Kodansha Comics lines as well.
And then, after that, I did a little bit of work at Crunchyroll, and while I was at Crunchyroll, I really came to understand more viscerally and, from a firsthand perspective, the importance of subscription services for this kind of thing. And, there are so many pirate apps out there.
What I think we really wanted to do with Mangamo was kind of take a page out of Crunchyroll's book and provide a legal option for people to use, one that would have a really broad and far-ranging selection of manga. And also one that would actually work to support the actual creators and publishers of the work in Japan. That's always been something that from day one has been really important to me.
Literary Joe: Now, I was reading one of the articles you have on LinkedIn about how anime is changing in the West; How do you think that informed the decisions that you made when putting Magamo together?
Dallas Middaugh: Well, I think it's important; first, I want to acknowledge that I'm one of the co-founders of Mangamo and that I work with Buddy Marini and Yusuke Sasano as well as a whole team, but those were the core group in terms of being the founders. So it certainly wasn't just me.
But again, kind of going back to what I was saying before, there are other manga subscription services out there. So what we wanted to do was to have a combination of introducing readers to new series that they may not have heard of as well as series that they are more familiar with.
That's why we were really excited a couple of months ago to announce our partnership with Kodansha, for example, because that brought in over a hundred series with things like Fire Force, and Attack on Titan, and Seven Deadly Sins.
But overall, we're actually working with 15 publishers currently. I'm never certain the exact number, cause we keep adding to that, but it's at least 15. We currently have over 300 series on the service, and it enables us to offer a little bit of something for everybody.
Literary Joe: I know you mentioned Attack on Titan, and I was going to ask, cause I was kind of scrolling through the stuff earlier. I saw Seven Deadly Sins and a couple of other things, but do you think Attack on Titan is the biggest, most well-known title that you guys have on the service?
Dallas Middaugh: I think that that's a hard question to answer. In the broadest sense, I suppose the answer is yes, but frequently, well, I guess if you're asking what's best known, yeah. Attack on Titan is probably the biggest, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the most popular at any given time.
You know, anime, again, I know this from working at Crunchyroll, there's anywhere from 40 to 80 anime series running concurrently every quarter, and they're constantly launching new things. So the reason I mentioned Seven Deadly Sins is that aside from it being a great series and being popular, it is, you know, the newest season came out on Netflix about a month ago at the beginning of August.
Fire Force is in the middle of its second season currently. Coming up, there's a great series called Two Year Eternity, which is going to be launching in anime. I've read it's going to be launching in October. So I'm really happy to have that series on the service.
But I think you're asking about it in more broad terms than that. And I would probably say probably yes, Attack on Titan is probably the most visibly recognizable series on the service.
*This interview has been edited for clarity, and was co-hosted by Anime Mojo contributor Nick Brooks.*
Mangamo is currently available for 4.99/month, and you can check it out here.