Here’s one for all our otaku readers: Today’s evening news reported on the release of Gumbo, Japan’s first free manga weekly.

Most of what is said in the video can be found in this article from Mainichi Shinbun:

Comic Gumbo, Japan’s first ever free weekly manga magazine, will hit the streets next week, bolstered by the success of a growing number of handout magazines like R25 and Hot Pepper.

Venture Publisher Dejima will start handing out Comic Gumbo from Tuesday next week, giving comic fans two complete stories and 11 series features, featuring such manga-ka as Tatsuya Egawa (who will give his own interpretation of novelist Soseki Natsume’s classic “Botchan”), Motoka Murakami, Hiroyuki Yoshida and Shuho Itabashi.

Dejima plans to produce 100,000 copies per issue, handing them out to the target readership of men in their 20s to 40s on Tuesdays and Wednesdays each week.

Gumbo will be distributed during busy periods in the morning and afternoon mostly at stations along the Yamanote Line, but will handed out at about 30 stations in the Tokyo area as far as Omiya, Yokohama and Chiba stations.

Gumbo will have 230 pages, about half the number of popular manga books, with around 26 pages devoted to ads. It will also be available free online.

If they ever start passing it out in the countryside, I might give it a try. It’s sounds a lot better than reading the random “free” manga weeklies that salarymen leave on the train.