Korean manhwa publisher NetComics is expanding its offerings with a new copublishing agreement to offer Yaoi Press titles online. In addition, Netcomics also announced it has licensed 16 Japanese manga series that cover a range of genres.
Yaoi Press publisher Yamila Abraham was looking for a way to promote her backlist of original global yaoi manga. Heewoon Chung, president of Korean manhwa (comics) publisher Netcomics, was looking for new content to draw more readers to his online comics. The two met in February at New York Comic-Con and agreed to a deal to put Yaoi Press titles online at Netcomics.com.
Yaoi Press titles can sometimes be just a bit risqué, so before she sealed the deal, Abraham made sure that Chung knew what he was getting into. She flipped to “the naughtiest scene” in Winter Demon, a sexy but not scandalous title rated for teens 16 and older, “just to make sure,” she said. Winter Demon will be Netcomics’ first Yaoi Press offering. With Korean boys’ love titles of its own like Let Dai and Boy Princess, Netcomics is no newcomer to this kind of content. However, Chung said Netcomics would not post extremely explicit titles until the publisher finds a way to screen out underage readers.
The Yaoi Press titles will supplement Netcomics’ 32 online manhwa series. Readers pay 20 to 25 cents per chapter, or about $1 per volume, to read the books online for 48 hours. Books go online months before the print volume is available, and Chung plans to keep all books online until Netcomics’ rights expire.
For Abraham, online sales supplement a robust business. Yaoi Press offers its print editions through bookstores, comics stores, and its retail site, and several are going into second and third printings this year. The bestselling titles are Winter Demon, Stallion and the Yaoi Hentai anthologies, which got a sales bump earlier this year when news that they were being sold on Wal-Mart’s Web site caused a brief controversy.
Abraham has 28 books ready to go online, at a rate of two per month, and by next year, her books will be going online before they see print. She is not worried that online viewing will cut into print sales. “By the time I met Heewoon at Comic-Con, I had been selling his [boys’ love manhwa] for a while on everythingyaoi.com and at conventions, and they were some of the top sellers,” she said. “It showed me it wasn’t hurting his sales at all.”
Netcomics president Heewoon Chung said the company has licensed 16 Japanese manga titles in a variety of genres. "There's comedy, romance, yaoi, action, thriller and fantasy," he said. "Many of them are old, so readers won't recognize the titles, but still very good."
The new manga series include Kazumi Tohno's cm0, a romance about a university professor involved with one of her students that was originally serialized in the Japanese magazine Chorus, which features josei, manga that targets young women. The other series is Three Times Before the Kiss by Jion Imamoto, the story of a long-distance romance told from the point of view of both partners. Although Three Times is a romance between a man and a woman, Imamoto specializes in shounen-ai (boys’ love) manga and has also written shojo manga under the pen name Kaori Tanagida. Two of the 16 manga are from the Japanese publisher Daitosha, the publisher of Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito. The other 14 are from Ecomix's Japanese partner NMG (Nihon Manga Gakuin).
Chung said the Japanese manga will be presented online in the same format as the company's manhwa, except the pages will read right to left as in the original Japanese. The price will also be the same. He added that the company has not decided whether to release the manga in print form. "We will gauge responses from our online readers and colleagues before we decide to print publish any of them," he said.
While users can read sample chapters and some entire series for free, they must register with a credit card to fully access the site. As a result, Chung has a good snapshot of his readership: 70% are female, and the ratio is even higher among paying users. Because they must have a credit card, most paying customers are over 18. The majority of Netcomics readers are already manga fans, although they may be reading Korean manhwa for the first time, Chung said. He added, “Those who have read scanlation manga [Japanese comics scanned and translated by fans for fans and distributed online] are more likely to be our users, since they are already used to reading manga on the screen.”
Chung said he approached other manga publishers at New York Comic-Con, but they all needed more time to decide. Abraham, who publishes original yaoi created by artists and writers across the U.S. and Europe, doesn’t have to deal with foreign licensors, and was free to say "yes" right away. Yaoi Press’s early titles were done as works for hire, but the company recently switched to royalty contracts including online sales, Abraham said, and the company retains some rights.
Adding manga from other publishers to its site has been part of Netcomics’ plan all along, Chung said. “We meant to start with our own titles, convince other publishers to work with us, then transform our site to accommodate other publishers’ titles as we go along,” he said. “One of our goals is to build a global comics site that is commercially successful. To do that, we need comics from all kinds of sources. This is only the beginning.”
