This week, Kodansha USA expanded its partnership with digital comic platform INKR Comics, with over 400 volumes of Kodansha-published manga now available through the service. Among the latest additions are Attack on Titan, To Your Eternity, A Silent Voice, and Your Lie in April, with more to follow next week, including Fire Force, FAIRY TAIL, and The Seven Deadly Sins.
Kodansha is one of a number of publishers who’ve partnered with INKR Comics. Others include Tokyopop, Image Comics, Mr Blue, Toons Family, Weibo, and FanFan. INKR includes free chapters of most works, and some comics freely available in their entirety. An INKR Extra subscription gives you access to the full catalogue for USD $4.99 a month.
INKR Comics launched in October this year with the aim of helping make comics more accessible to audiences around the world, while also ensuring that creators get paid for their work. It grew out of MangaRock, an aggregator and reader app for manga scanlations—that is, unofficial translations of scanned manga that haven’t been licensed for official translations. Scanlations are often the only way for people to read unlicensed manga, but still have the a negative impact on original creators and their ability to make money from their work.
INKR Comics is a way of trying to address both those problems, by creating new pathways for translation and global distribution in an easy and convenient way, along with a revenue model that’s affordable for users but still lets creators get fair pay for their work.
At the time of writing, INKR includes around 380 series’, covering a broad range of genres from action to boys love. Some of my personal highlights among the mix include Welcome to the Ballroom, I Hate Fairyland, Love Hina, Tokyo Tarareba Girls, The Wicked and the Divine, Priest, Monstress, and Kasane.