The joy of manga is that I always find new stuff to read. There is an endless stream of new series being published in Japan, with more of them making their way to the US every year. And yet, there are titles that I see and lament that I won’t get to read in English. Recently, I stumbled upon a manga about Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and the early days of Apple that casts Steve Jobs as an anime protagonist whose special power is simply getting people to do what he says.

Steves was first published back in 2014, just a few years after Steve Jobs died in 2011. It follows the pair of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their early days developing the microcomputer, which would eventually become the Mac and turn Apple into an international tech giant. There are plenty of creative liberties taken here, such as portraying Jobs as a shoeless hippy with a seemingly supernatural force of personality, but you expect that from a title that adapts the story of a nearly mythological figure in American history.

While I’m a geek and someone who loves technology, there are limits to my personal knowledge. I’m not an expert in Steve Jobs’ history, nor am I a particularly avid user of Apple products, so I don’t hold a particular reverence for the subject here, but that’s okay because it never feels like Steves is going all in on being a true historical documentary. 

It is stylized, as you’d expect from a pair of storytellers who are talking about one of the most famous duos in the technology sector. Steve Wozniak is cast as a technological genius who relies heavily on Steve Jobs to make his ideas viable. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs is shown as a barefoot, brash, and unashamedly confident in his ability to make the impossible happen.

The first chapter shows the pair walking into Intel’s headquarters and asking to use their DRAM chip in their prototype personal computer. The Intel executive is initially reluctant, but he gets hit with Jobs’ “reality distortion field,” which was apparently a real thing that people use to describe his ability to make everyone believe whatever he was selling. The next minute, the executive is signing over the chip to the pair, somehow believing it was his idea all along.

It is an interesting opening, which sees the pair set on a path to change the world with their new technology. Just like anything else, it takes some liberties with the how and why certain things happen, but the movie industry gets to rewrite history every time they make a musical biopic, so why shouldn’t manga get the same freedom? The work from UME, a manga duo composed of writer Takehiro Ozawa and artist Asako Seo, and writer Keiichi Matsunaga is at least a different take on a story we’ve heard for years now. Jobs is cast as the mythological figure whose force of personality drove those around him to buy into his specific vision for the computer industry.

So why haven’t you read Steves before? Because it never got an English release, which is honestly a shame. An attempt to localize it was made back in 2018 through a Kickstarter campaign, but that failed to raise the funds needed to release it outside of Japan. Instead, the series has gone relatively unnoticed overseas. The first chapter has been translated and released for free, but nothing else has.

There is an alternate timeline where we got to see all of Steves translated into English, but we do not live in a blessed world. Instead, I’m just stuck with reading the start of the story and wishing I could see more. How do they handle the fractured relationship between Jobs and Wozniak? The rise of Apple as a corporate behemoth? The change in culture where personal computers became not a luxury item but a necessary part of nearly every home? There is so much I wish to see from this manga, but I will likely never get the chance.

Want to know what's coming up next in pop culture? Check out Popverse's guides to:

• Upcoming movies
• Upcoming TV shows
• Upcoming comics
• Upcoming games
• Upcoming fiction books
• Upcoming comic conventions