dmp

As someone who stayed away from manga for far longer than he should have, and ended up missing out on some pretty interesting stuff because of it, I'm always looking to expand my horizons by catching up on interesting classics, and over the past few years, DMP has been happy to provide. Thanks to a series of Kickstarter campaigns based around bringing classic --- but relatively unknown --- Osamu Tezuka stories into print in America, the publisher has been filling up bookshelves with titles like Alabaster and Storm Fairy. Now, though, it's expanding its crowdfunding efforts into a different direction.

On the off chance that your birthday party for manga legend Osamu Tezuka has lasted two weeks with no sign of stopping and you're looking for a way to finally cap it off, then I have some good news. This week saw the digital debut of a whole bunch of Tezuka's manga on Comixlology. Released by Platinum Manga, DMP's imprint for high-end Tezuka projects, there are over a dozen volumes in all, covering everything from the relatively well-known Unico to Tezuka's spin on Treasure Island and a world-traveling adventure complete with samurai and pirates to space westerns to a story about a cat that has all of Astro Boy's powers, which one assumes includes a machine gun in his butt.

Earlier this year, DMP started a series of Kickstarter campaigns designed to bring some of legendary creator Osamu Tezuka's stories back into print in America, including classics like Unico and more obscure titles like Storm Fairy. Today, it launched its latest project, Wonder 3, a book that might just have the most intriguing premise of the bunch. Set in 196X, a year that finds Earth ravaged by a massive war to the point where a group of aliens are debating whether to save the planet or destroy it. To make their decision, they send a team of three investigators, disguised as animals, along with a gigantic bomb and a time limit of one year to determine whether or not we're worth saving.

Over the past year, DMP has been using Kickstarter to fund the American release of comics by Osamu Tezuka. Now, after the successful campaigns for Alabaster and Clockwork Apple, they're setting their sights on Storm Fairy, a collection of shojo stories by the incredibly prolific creator of Astro Boy.

All right, look. I've been pretty late on getting around to reading the considerable library of titles that Osamu Tezuka produced over the course of his forty-year career in manga. Much as I've enjoyed going back through Astro Boy, and as much as I'm looking forward to continuing it when Dark Horse's line of omnibus editions drop this fall, I still haven't read Black Jack or Buddha or any of his other major works, despite knowing that I really should. But folks, I am doing my best, which is why I really hope you head over to Kickstarter and throw a few bucks towards DMP's project to bring Tezuka's Alabaster to America.

In the past few years the manga industry has experienced upheaval, to put it lightly. A number of seemingly unconnected, but pressing, issues have turned into a perfect storm of sudden, dramatic change. Online manga piracy, generally conducted in the open on sites that contain thousands of pages of copyrighted work, finally reached the point where publishers could no longer turn a blind eye to ot