Staying up to date with all the hottest manga is not as easy as it seems, despite the seamless access that digital publishing allows. In Japan, several publishers hold the rights to popular manga series, meaning Western readers have to juggle several different apps and subscriptions. That issue could finally be solved with the arrival of Crunchyroll Manga, a new digital manga app from the anime streaming juggernaut, launching on Oct. 9 for iOS and Android in the U.S. and Canada, with a web version to follow on Oct. 15.
First announced in January, Crunchyroll Manga will offer an official first look during New York Comic Con 2025. A new press release announced the app will launch on the same day, Oct. 9, promising a revolutionary experience through a partnership with several major publishing partners, including AlphaPolis, COMPASS, Square Enix, VIZ Media, and Yen Press. Additional partners like Shueisha, J-Novel Club, ThirdlineNEXT, highstone, and more will follow in the future.
The series available to read will include One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, Daemons of the Shadow Realm, The Apothecary Diaries, Delicious in Dungeon, My Dress-Up Darling, The Summer Hikaru Died, Lycoris Recoil, Sasaki and Miyano, Tsukimichi: Moonlit Fantasy, Maiden of the Dragon: Falling for the Demon’s Lies, and many more.
Even a quick glance at the list reveals the app could be the go-to choice for manga readers in the Western world. While Shueisha has its own digital manga app, Manga Plus, other publishers are much harder to access legally. Delicious in Dungeon, for example, is only available in digital volumes published by Yen Press. Square Enix also has its app, Manga UP!, but access to new chapters is limited by daily free currency. Everything else requires in-app purchases or a subscription, which can pile up quickly over different platforms, making reading manga expensive and not exactly user-friendly.
Image: Crunchyroll
Crunchyroll Manga promises fans can get rid of multiple subscriptions and purchases by having the most popular series all in one place. This will be a premium add-on to the Crunchyroll subscription service with the following pricing:
- Crunchyroll Fan subscription + Manga – $11.99 USD / $15.49 CAD per month (includes Manga add-on at $4.00 USD / $5.50 CAD)
- Crunchyroll Mega Fan subscription + Manga – $15.49 USD / $17.49 CAD per month (includes Manga add-on at $3.50 USD / $5.00 CAD)
If you’re already paying for the Ultimate Fan tier ($15.99/month), you’ll also get access to this new manga service automatically.
All tiers include unlimited ad-free reading across mobile, tablet, and web, plus the ability to download chapters for offline reading. “Hundreds of chapters from hundreds of titles” will be available from day one, with new ones added later as the library expands.
One thing worth noting is that there are no manga from Kodansha in the list provided by the press release. The publisher also has its own digital app, K Manga, where chapters are available through purchasable tickets. However, it could very well be that, once the full list of series available through Crunchyroll Manga is revealed, popular Kodansha manga such as Attack on Titan, Vinland Saga, Shangri-La Frontier, and Gachiakuta will be included too. These all have anime that are available to watch on Crunchyroll, after all.
Having all the best anime and manga available through a single service could truly be a revolution for Western fans, and this could also lead to a decrease in manga piracy, a persistent issue that keeps damaging the industry, despite many attempts to curb it.