Viz Manga adds Evangelion Manga to its online viewer.
By The Eva Monkey on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
One of the greatest weaknesses of the Evangelion manga is its rate of production. The mangaka, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, has been working on it since prior to the original television series airing in 1995. Which means that yes, the series is still ongoing, and has not yet finished. However we are getting quite close to the conclusion. The story is currently somewhere around the midpoint of The End of Evangelion. Naturally, production of a manga series over such a long period presents challenges to a foreign company when licensing and distributing it. With the exception of the most recently published volumes, all volumes of the Evangelion manga are out of print, and several of them qualify as rare, particularly volume 9, which was printed in unusually low amounts. Naturally, this presents a challenge to anyone who wishes to read the manga. It’s not exactly “collectible”. But I heard today that Viz has begun adding Sadamoto’s manga series to their online viewer, which is very encouraging. Granted, some will always prefer the actual, tangible, printed release, but this will help alleviate some of the problem, and allow more people to read it. Currently only the first two stages are online, with the first being free, and the second being $0.99, which I would consider an okay pricepoint. New stages will be released weekly. You can also get Viz’s app and read it on your Android or iOS device.