Hachi Report! February 2026

Welcome to Hachi Report, a monthly newsletter breaking down recent developments in the manga and manhwa world. Thanks to the efforts of our hardworking delivery fox Hachi, we have all the information you need about upcoming comics, new and notable events, and backstage publisher maneuvering. This month: a manga competition, the collapse of an online piracy network, and new laws regarding generative AI in South Korea.

Licensing Highlights

Say Hello to Mr. Wallaby!

Writer/Artist: Marume Goshika
Publisher: Kodansha
Debut: Fall 2026

The Pitch: It’s a manga for kids about a talking wallaby who travels to Japan and decides to become a teacher. Sign me up! Paddington could never.

Rainy Serenade Omnibus

Writer/Artist: Haruka Kawachi
Publisher: Kodansha
Debut: Fall 2026

The Pitch: A time travel romance manga by the author of Natsuyuki Rendezvous, published in supersized 400-page volumes. The press release calls it “one of the most-requested Kodansha manga of all time.”

Jagaan

Writer: Muneyuki Kaneshiro
Artist: Kensuke Nishida
Publisher: Kana
Debut: September 2026

The Pitch: “A horror-filled, dark and supernatural journey” by the writer behind high-octane sports hit Blue Lock.

Vegetable Sandwich

Writer/Artist: Banjou Saitou
Publisher: Manga Mavericks Books
Debut: September 2026

The Pitch: The world’s wimpiest (yet oddly muscular) high school student joins forces with the world’s strongest elementary school student! Inspired by 80s classics, this is Manga Mavericks’s first series directly licensed from a publisher.

Sleeping Dead

Writer/Artist: Nemui Asada
Publisher: Seven Seas
Debut: December 2026 (single omnibus volume)

The Pitch: It’s zombie BL! This series earned a rave write-up from translator and tastemaker Jocelyne Allen. (Another fan of Asada: Chainsaw Man artist Tatsuki Fujimoto.)

Good Morning, Good Night and See You Tomorrow

Writer/Artist: Moka Onmae
Publisher: Seven Seas
Debut: November 2026

The Pitch: One of six manga series promoted by MINT, this series takes inspiration from the artist’s own battle with cancer. Recommended for graphic medicine fans.

My Sketchy Roommate

Writer/Artist: Nagata Kabi
Publisher: Seven Seas
Debut: December 2026

The Pitch: Premiere manga memoirist Nagata Kabi is back at it again, this time discussing an imaginary (?!) roommate.

Seven Sundays

Writer/Artist: Charyeok
Publisher: Ize Press
Debut: July 2026

The Pitch: Firefighter BL originally published via webtoon platforms (Lezhin, Tapas etc.) Can two former lovers rebuild their relationship over seven dates? One of them has a kid, too.

Breaking News

Publisher Crossed Hearts Announces GL-Focused Imprint GLAM BEAT!

Crossed Hearts, a new publisher with offices in both the United States and India, announced on its blog that it is starting a new Girls’ Love-focused imprint called GLAM BEAT! “Yuri has long been one of the most emotionally rich and versatile genres in comics and prose,” it says, “yet it has often been treated as a subcategory rather than a genre worthy of its own infrastructure.” GLAM BEAT! aims to change this by publishing a variety of titles in both digital and print versions. It is not “a limited experiment or a short-term label,” but “a long-term commitment to girls’ love as a genre with depth, variety, and global relevance.” Crossed Hearts is a new entity, and no licenses have yet been announced; still, readers of Girls’ Love have historically been underserved abroad. Here’s hoping GLAM BEAT! finds success.

Comici launches comici Manga Reading App

Per Anime News Network, the “manga data science researcher” Comici has launched a new app called comici Manga. This app features series from Comic Growl, Kimi Comi, Manga-SPA! and others. One example: Jiro Taniguchi’s series The Solitary Gourmet, courtesy of Manga-SPA! A Premium subscription on the app, which lets you read the majority of chapters available, is $4.99 per month. A small number of chapters are also available to read for free on the official website.

Unfortunately, as MangaAlerts pointed out via Bluesky, the translation quality and lettering for each series is inconsistent. Neither does Comici provide information regarding who was involved in localizing each series, or whether generative AI was used. The available version of Kore Yamazaki’s series The Ancient Magus Bride uses Bushiroad’s previously reported AI English translation.

Nominees Announced for 19th Manga Taisho Awards

Per Crunchyroll News, the Manga Taisho Executive Committee announced the 12 nominees for the 19th annual Manga Taisho Awards on January 20th. They include Shonen Jump series like Ichi the Witch as well as more obscure titles like Kaiju o Kaibo Suru in Comic Beam. I’m particularly curious about Yuta Tsukuda’s RIOT, which I’ve heard great things about. Only three of the series (Ichi the Witch, Home at the Horizon and Maison and the Man-Eating Apartment) have English translations at this moment.

Previous winners of the Manga Taisho Awards include Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Spacewalking With You and The Darwin Incident, among other acclaimed works. Nominees are (according to Crunchyroll News) “chosen by mostly Japanese booksellers based on what they would recommend to readers.” The majority of past winners (save for Chihayafuru and Umimachi Diary) were published in shonen and seinen magazines.

Go Nagai Among Nominees Chosen for Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame

Comic-Con’s Eisner Awards website announced that Go Nagai, among 18 other individuals, has been chosen to be inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame. These nominees were selected by six judges including “Michael T. Gilbert, Karen Green, Alonso Nuñez, Diana Schutz, Jim Thompson, and Maggie Thompson.” Voters will choose an additional four nominees from an additional selection of 16 chosen by the judges.

Past manga artists voted into the Hall of Fame include Osamu Tezuka, Moto Hagio and Rumiko Takahashi. Nagai’s influential works include Devilman, Cutie Honey and Harenchi Gakuen, all of which are influential and extremely filthy.

Manga PLUS Teams Up with Japan Expo for Manga Competition

Manga PLUS announced via X that it is collaborating with Japan Expo in Paris to run A la Recherche du Nouveau Mangaka, a competition for up and coming comics artists. The contest accepts both English and French contributions. This is just the most recent of attempts by the Japanese and international manga industry to scout global talent, including the KADOKAWA WORLD MANGA CONTEST and Viz Originals One-Shots Program.

CODA Leads Enforcement Against Bato.to Manga Piracy Network

According to a press release from Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association (or CODA), last year the Shanghai Public Security Bureau of China detained a man who allegedly operated Bato.to, “the world’s largest manga piracy site.” This included not just Bato.to itself but roughly 59 other sites including mangapark.io and xbato.com. These 60 sites were closed as of January 19th 2026, and the man has since been released on bail.

CODA’s Beijing Office filed a criminal complaint on behalf of Japanese publishers “KADOKAWA CORPORATION, KODANSHA LTD., SHUEISHA Inc., SHOGAKUKAN Inc., and SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.” This is a separate matter from Kakao Entertainment, which (per TorrentFreak) separately pressured the Bato.to network via “its dedicated anti-piracy enforcement arm, P.CoK.”

Bato.to was founded in 2011 as a host for fan translated manga that did not watermark pages or host series without a fan translation group’s permission. It was a pirate site, but an idealistic one. That iteration of Bato.to died when its administrator closed the site in 2018 and the domain name was scooped up by those who were until this January the current owners. Now Bato.to is dead, as was originally intended.

Lore Olympus Animated Series Rises From Production Hell

A recent press release from WEBTOON has announced that Lore Olympus, the popular and award-winning WEBTOON comic drawn by Rachel Smythe, is receiving an animated series courtesy of Prime Video. It will be co-produced by WEBTOON Productions and The Jim Henson Company, with Julia Cooperman (writer on the TV series Pantheon and Willow) serving as showrunner.

Now you may ask, “wait a minute, wasn’t a Lore Olympus series produced by The Jim Henson Company announced back in 2019?” While this is correct, at that time there was no information regarding where or how it might air. Additionally, former showrunner Stephanie K. Smith has left the project. While Amazon’s involvement makes it that much more likely that Lore Olympus will survive production hell, time will tell just what the series will look like when it finally airs.

Lezhin Chows Down on Short Drama with Lezhin Snack

Per Chosunbiz, Lezhin Entertainment is launching the short drama platform Lezhin Snack on February 4th. The platform will host “screen adaptations of webtoon intellectual property (IP) proven on Lezhin Comics and Bomtoon” as well as “original works produced in-house.” As a reminder, Lezhin Entertainment (under the KidariStudio umbrella) owns Lezhin Comics, formerly a trailblazer in letting readers pay for comics via its platform.

While short dramas are relatively obscure in the United States, they are much more popular internationally, particularly in China (where they are called duanju.) They are optimized for vertical phones just like webtoons themselves. Many are also influenced by webnovels just as webtoons are.

South Korea’s AI Basic Act Requires Acknowledgement of Generative AI Use

South Korea’s AI Basic Act, which was enacted in 2025, came into effect starting in 2026. Aside from dedicating financial resources to the generative AI industry (Article 37) and establishing a National AI Committee, Policy Center and Safety Institute (Articles 7, 11 and 12) the Act also includes measures meant to make the use of generative AI more transparent. Article 31 requires that “where providing GenAI or products or services utilizing GenAI, AI business operators shall clearly indicate to users that the outputs are generated by GenAI.” For the next year, the government will advise companies that run afoul of this rule. Any rulebreakers afterwards will be fined 30 million won (over $20,000.)

While this law does not necessarily apply to individual artists, it will affect companies like WEBTOON and Tapas. Webtoon has already begun experimenting with generative AI services like AI Painter and Toon Radar. Some readers have also pushed back against generative AI, with the series The Knight King Who Returned with a God spurring a sitewide fan boycott. With luck, the AI Basic Act should make it easier to tell which comics use generative AI and which do not.

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