Getting Started with K-Comics - Manta

K-Comics have exploded in popularity over the past few years, which means there are many sites and apps to choose from when you're looking for your next read. So, we thought it might be helpful to give you a place to start, especially since most sites have vast libraries that can be overwhelming at first glance. For our first look, let's see what Manta has to offer!

With a more varied catalog than it first appears, Manta has a mix of novels and comics, including some titles available in both formats. Although it leans heavily on the romance side, there are a variety of other genres, including adaptations of Western novels (The Bromance Book Club), Japanese novels (The Night Market), and plenty of original content. Many of their titles are available in all-ages or uncensored formats, with the latter often being behind a secondary paywall, with readers purchasing “gems” which can then be used to buy chapters. The quality of their content is generally excellent, with clear, professional translations and the option to buy (using gems) a free story if you want to be sure it's always in your account to re-read.

Below is a small sample of what's available – five series in different genres to help you get started in your exploration.

---

Soap Opera

Trash Will Always Be Trash, adapted by TEAVA from the novel by H.N. and illustrated by Vertex, is the answer to the question, “What should I read after I'm all caught up in The Remarried Empress?” Like that addictive series, this one also features a young woman who is wronged by her man when he shows up with his pregnant mistress. But unlike Navier and Sovieshu, Layla and Phillen aren't married yet – they've just been engaged since they were children. Layla came to live with Phillen's family at a young age to escape her abusive stepmother, and his parents adored her, inspiring her to do her best to learn to be a perfect duchess. But everything falls apart when they die in a carriage accident, and Phillen is sent off to war. When he returns six years later, it's with a pregnant mistress in tow – a mistress he expects Layla to accept completely.

If you're angry now, just wait until you read the story, which I highly recommend. Whether Phillen or his scheming mistress Sisley is the eponymous trash is a tossup, but their treatment of Layla is reprehensible. Sisley is determined to oust Layla (although she never says as much, instead smiling slyly for the camera) and relentlessly undermines everything she does while badmouthing Layla at every turn. She objects to how informally Layla speaks to Phillen, goes into Layla's wardrobe, steals her dresses, and cries when reprimanded; she sends Layla half-eaten food…she's just generally awful. Layla fights back, but she's so thrown by the drastic change in her circumstances that she's not really prepared to beat Sisley at her own game, and for the first ten-odd chapters, we're watching her get systematically broken down, her every move blocked.

Fortunately, things start to shift at the end of chapter ten, when Layla manages to go into town with only her faithful maid, Misa. (If Misa were in charge, Sisley would be dining on rat poison.) While there, Layla helps a girl escape a usurious lender, and a young nobleman she's never met before observes her. As the next four chapters unfold, we can see that he's less a savior in the Prince Charming mold and more someone who truly sees what Layla is capable of…and wants to help her fulfill her promise. Oh, he's definitely attracted to her, too, but that's almost secondary to what he's offering her: both an escape and a place to truly belong. With lush art and a heroine you can't help but root for but who isn't artificially strong, Trash Will Always Be Trash is the epitome of a soap opera and a story that's hard to put down.

Horror

Based on the novel by Seoh Nam, Winter and seogul's adaptation of Pound of Flesh is remarkably effective body horror. Taking place in a version of South Korea where it is customary to share your own flesh with others, this short work uses cannibalism as a metaphor for power and sexual harassment. If you think that sounds trite or odd, you're probably one of the lucky ones who has never experienced either, because survivors can tell you that both truly feel like being eaten alive.

The five-chapter story follows a young woman hired for a probationary position at a nameless company, with the possibility of being hired full-time. She's the second of two new hires, and something about the company's purported “family” attitude makes her uncomfortable – something that only gets worse when, at her welcome dinner, everyone starts carving off slices of themselves to cook for each other. No one has to, of course, but it's clear that the director wants them to, even slicing off bits of himself to serve his subordinates with false joviality and gleeful superiority. He's pressuring the protagonist to partake when the other new hire, another young woman, shows up. She immediately begins offering everyone cuts of her flesh, and her arms bear the evidence of repeated feedings.

The plot is fairly typical: the protagonist is uncomfortable with the flesh sharing and is fairly certain that the other new woman is being made to – or made to feel like she has to – share her body with the director. The metaphor isn't subtle, but it works, giving a visual of a woman made to literally carve away pieces of herself because that's what it takes for her to be taken seriously or to advance at all in her career. But even if the two women escape from this director, from this company, that doesn't change the world. The consumption of human flesh will still happen, and those who aren't comfortable sharing their bodies will be made unwelcome. It's a harsh story, with dark, simple art that drives home the horror of our ordinary world.

You don't have to be literally eaten to be consumed by those who put themselves above you, and there will always be another bully waiting with his knife.

BL

By definition, most BL has a strong romance component, and Reunion, written by 2coin and illustrated by Deulsum, is no exception. In fact, it's pretty strictly a romance and an interesting one at that. The story takes place across two times, the present day and seven years in the past. Protagonist Hakyung comes from a family struggling financially; after his father's death, his mother came down with an unnamed disease with high treatment costs. In his early twenties, he begins working as many jobs as he can to pay for her treatment and support his younger brother, so when a wealthy man approaches him with an offer, he's not in any position to refuse, no matter how unorthodox it is. That offer is for him to disguise himself as Jiyoung Han, a childhood friend who died in a fire with her whole family. The wealthy man's father is at the end of his life and is unaware that Jiyoung died years ago, and to make his dad happy, the man wants Hakyung to be Jiyoung for one summer. While in disguise, he meets Yoonsung, the grandson of the dying man, and the two form a bond that looks a lot like love, even though Yoonsung is 99.99% sure that Hakyung isn't Jiyoung.

We don't really know what happened at the end of that summer by the end of chapter fourteen, but when Hakyung and Yoonsung reunite seven years later, Yoonsung has gaps in his memory concerning the summer they spent together. He's clearly attracted to Hakyung, although he doesn't consciously recognize him as Jiyoung, and he's very keen on getting to know the other man better. Hakyung, meanwhile, is tormented by the way that he lied that summer, even though he knows it was what he had to do at the time, and the story's progress is tightly tied to both men's memories (or not) of the month they lived together. There's an undercurrent of yearning to this story that's fascinating, because neither Hakyung nor Yoonsung want to, or can, fully admit or understand what it is that's pulling them together. The past storyline is doled out slowly across these chapters, and 2coin does an excellent job of keeping things balanced on the edge of frustration and urgency. It's the sort of story you throw down only to desperately pick it back up again because not knowing what will happen isn't an option.

Science Fiction

Like Pound of Flesh, The Stand-In is based on a novel, this time by Neoul Shim, adapted by Chanmi Lee and illustrated by I.C.. It's science fiction, but in a way that feels perhaps a little too real today: Doyong Kang was a child actor before an unspecified accident, and he's never recaptured the fame of his glory days. He's fairly certain he'll never act in a film again when he gets a call from a well-known studio. But what they want isn't exactly his skills: they want the rights to his image and voice, which they'll use to create a fully CGI version of him, powered by an AI actor. It's movie star pay for about two hours of work, and with some misgivings, Doyong agrees. But can he really call himself an actor? Isn't he letting down all of the people who are touched by the film and “his” performance in it?

At only five chapters long, The Stand-In doesn't provide any concrete answers. Doyong never really is comfortable with the choices he makes, nor is he fully aware of whether he's making them based on himself or on how he perceives the people around him, be they fans fellow actors, or friends. But the strength of this short title is in how it forces us to think about the ways we interact with the arts. How would you feel if you were Doyong? Is it worth the money if you have to lie, either to the world or to yourself? It's a bit like the old conundrum of which is more important, the artist or the man, and whether or not the two can exist separately within the same person. The art is deceptively simple here (as is the plot, really), and it has an uncanny CG quality that enhances the questions the story is asking. If this sounds like a piece you'd read in school, I do think that's a valid interpretation, but it's still worth examining as the world moves ever closer to the reality that Doyong finds himself confronted with.

Romantasy

You can't really talk about webtoons without including romantasy, a portmanteau of “romance” and “fantasy” that I personally detest as a word. (As a genre, I enjoy it.) Sometimes, it looks like that's mostly what sites and apps like Manta have to offer, so it would be remiss of me not to include one. There are plenty of excellent choices, like Under the Oak Tree and It Was Just a Contractual Marriage, but for my money, there's nothing more exciting than the fact that now-defunct site Netcomics migrated some of its content over to Manta, and that includes the work of manhwaga Wann. Wann is simply one of the best creators of intensely addictive stories, and in Survival Marriage, she dips her toe into the romantasy pool. The plot is an interesting combination of parallel worlds and reverse isekai – protagonist Chayee, after moving into a new apartment to start grad school, suddenly finds herself having highly realistic dreams about the vaguely Middle Eastern fantasy kingdom of Tatas. In her dreams, Chayee is Tasul, a maid who somehow got switched with a woman who was supposed to wed Lord Kadir. Kadir is an irai, a human cursed with beast blood who can only live a normal life if he has sex with his perfect mate. The assumption is that someone was trying to kill Tasul, but instead, Kadir imprints on her, and she becomes his official wife.

But where's the isekai bit, you ask? Well, it seems that Chayee and Tasul are, in fact, the same person, and that means that when she meets Kadir's modern Korean counterpart, the wealthy entrepreneur Dohun, their bond carries over. Simply having them meet while Chayee has Tasul's knowledge may have been the trigger, but the more pertinent matter is that without Chayee's permission, Dohun can't exit a store or unlock his car; he's almost literally tied to her. He's starting to have dreams about Tasul and Kadir as well – as is Chayee's roommate Nari, who may be the woman Kadir was supposed to marry – but neither he nor Chayee can fully understand what's going on. It's a fascinating setup, playing with “fated mate” tropes more commonly seen in werewolf and omegaverse fiction while also leaning into the idea of true love being unstoppable; Chayee and Dohun very clearly aren't exact copies of Tasul and Kadir, and they have to figure out how to navigate their relationship as themselves. Wann's art is easy on the eyes, and the fantasy realm of Tatas is a joy to look at, while the story itself is far more difficult to put down than you'd expect. It may not quite be living up to Give to the Heart, a science fiction romance that's my personal favorite of hers (and is available on Manta's app, but not their site), but I think it'll get there.

---

Manta's library is vast, and there's a lot more to explore than I've gone over here. With a good mix of premium titles that you need to pay extra for and free-with-a-subscription series, it's not hard to find something to read that suits your palette. Manta's translations are among the best in the webtoon business, as is the caliber of their stories, so if you're a fan of Korean comics, definitely head over and see what you can find.