Matt Schley
October 9, 2012 
While this week’s biggest crowd-funding story was that of Production I.G.’s Kick-Heart, it wasn’t the only game in town.
Japan-based manga website J-Comi, which offers free, legal digital versions of classic manga, held its own crowd-funding project in recent days, offering up digital sets of limited edition manga with extras such as previously unpublished works. Each of the sets cost 1,050 yen (about $13).
J-Comi was founded in 2011 to distribute out-of-print manga in digital form. Excepting crowd-funding projects like this week’s, J-Comi’s files are generally free to download with profits collected via advertising. The site was founded by Ken Akamatsu (Love Hina) to combat sites that were distributing scanned manga without permission.
Crowd-sourcing has also worked well for U.S.-based Digital Manga, who have been using Kickstarter the last several months to back publication of several classics works by “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka. Their latest project reached both its “stretch goals,” leading to the release of Tezuka’s Unico, Atomcat and Triton of the Sea.
Sources: Asahi Shinbun
https://ajw.asahi.com/article/cool_japan/anime_news/AJ201210020072
Digital Manga Kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitalmanga/publish-osamu-tezukas-unico-in-english-in-full-col
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