Yaoi Press is an independent yaoi comic publisher based in Nevada. Founded in 2004 by publisher Yamila Abraham, the company specializes in Global BL, or yaoi comics originally published outside of Asia. Yaoi Press publishes original OEL manga as well as European yaoi in translation, and features both single volume comics and comic series. As of 2020, Yaoi Press had fifty titles on the market. [1] [2] One of Yaoi Press's early publishing strategies in order to improve the reputation of OEL manga among yaoi fans was to headhunt famous artists of Global BL. [3] In October 2007, Yaoi Press launched a comic book line in order to provide a less expensive option for customers. [4]
Yaoi Press held a fan convention from the 20th to 22nd in 2008 called Yaoi Jamboree, in Phoenix, Arizona. Various manga artists who had previously worked for the company were invited as guests and an art book of submissions by attended were distributed at the convention. [5] [6]
In 2017, Yaoi Press founder Yamila Abraham launched a visual novel company called Y Press Games. [7]
Manga are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long history in earlier Japanese art. The term manga is used in Japan to refer to both comics and cartooning. Outside of Japan, the word is typically used to refer to comics originally published in Japan.
Boys' love, also known by its abbreviation BL, is a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters. It is typically created by women for a female audience and is thus distinct from homoerotic media marketed to gay men, though BL does also attract a male audience and can be produced by male creators. BL spans a wide range of media, including manga, anime, drama CDs, novels, video games, television series, films, and fan works.
Shotacon, abbreviated from Shōtarō complex, is, in Japanese contexts, the attraction to young boy characters, or media centered around this attraction. The term refers to a genre of manga and anime wherein prepubescent or pubescent male characters are depicted in a suggestive or erotic manner, whether in the obvious role of object of attraction, or the less apparent role of "subject".
Tokyopop is an American distributor, licensor and publisher of anime, manga, manhwa and Western manga-style works. The German publishing division produces German translations of licensed Japanese properties and original English-language manga, as well as original German-language manga. Tokyopop's US publishing division publishes works in English. Tokyopop has its US headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California. Its parent company's offices are in Tokyo, Japan and its sister company's office is in Hamburg, Germany.
An original English-language manga or OEL manga is a comic book or graphic novel drawn in the style of manga and originally published in English. The term "international manga", as used by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, encompasses all foreign comics which draw inspiration from the "form of presentation and expression" found in Japanese manga. This may also apply to manga-inspired comics made in other languages.
VIZ Media, LLC is an American entertainment company headquartered in San Francisco, California, focused on publishing manga, and distribution and licensing Japanese anime, films, and television series.
Digital Manga is a California-based publishing company that licenses and releases Japanese manga, anime, and related merchandise in the English language.
Manga, or comics, have appeared in translation in many different languages in different countries. France represents about 40% of the European comic market and in 2011, manga represented 40% of the comics being published in the country. In 2007, 70% of the comics sold in Germany were manga. In the United States, manga comprises a small industry, especially when compared to the inroads that Japanese animation or Japanese video games have made in the USA. One example of a manga publisher in the United States, VIZ Media, functions as the American affiliate of the Japanese publishers Shogakukan and Shueisha. Though the United Kingdom has fewer manga publishers than the U.S., most manga sold in the United Kingdom are published by U.S. publishing companies like Viz Media and Kodansha Comics which are in turn owned by their Japanese counterparts. Alongside the United Kingdom, the U.S. manga publishers also sell their English translated manga in other English speaking nations like Canada, Australia and New Zealand with manga being quite popular in Australia compared to other English speaking countries.
Antique Bakery is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Fumi Yoshinaga. The slice of life series follows the lives of four men who work in a pâtisserie. It was originally serialized in the manga magazine Wings from 1999 to 2001, and collected into four tankōbon volumes published by Shinshokan; a spin-off dōjinshi series has also been produced.
In comics, LGBT themes are a relatively new concept, as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) themes and characters were historically omitted from the content of comic books and their comic strip predecessors due to anti-gay censorship. LGBT existence was included only via innuendo, subtext and inference. However the practice of hiding LGBT characters in the early part of the twentieth century evolved into open inclusion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and comics explored the challenges of coming-out, societal discrimination, and personal and romantic relationships between gay characters.
Tina Anderson is an American comics writer. She creates gay comics and women's yaoi, or Boys' Love. Anderson coined the term "GloBL" to encourage fans of yaoi/BL to think about implications of a BL aesthetic outside of Japanese culture. Anderson has written graphic novels and short stories that are included in collections from various publishers such as Class Comics, Yaoi Press, Sin Factory, DramaQueen, and Iris Print. Anderson stated in a November 2010 interview that 2011 would be her final year writing homoerotic graphic novels. Collected episodes of Anderson's online science fiction serial Femitokon debuted in December 2020 as an original English-language light novel called Suffocation.
You Higuri is a Japanese shōjo and yaoi manga artist who has made several appearances at anime and manga conventions in the United States, as well as in Germany. Her first U.S. appearance was at the initial Yaoi-Con in San Francisco in 2001. She is known especially for her drawings of beautiful fantasy men in romantic storylines set in historical Europe, such as Gorgeous Carat in early 20th-century France and Cantarella during the Italian Renaissance.
Yishan Li is a Chinese-British comics and manhua illustrator. She is self-taught. Li has worked on popular comic book titles such as Hellboy, Batwoman, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She describes her own comics as "'girly stuff' ... ranging from historical detective dramas to young girls' adventure stories".
The yaoi fandom consists of the readers of yaoi, a genre of male homosexual narratives. Individuals in the yaoi fandom may attend conventions, maintain/post to fansites, create fanfiction/fanart, etc. In the mid-1990s, estimates of the size of the Japanese yaoi fandom were at 100,000–500,000 people. Despite increased knowledge of the genre among the general public, readership remained limited in 2008. English-language fan translations of From Eroica with Love circulated through the slash fiction community in the 1980s, forging a link between slash fiction fandom and yaoi fandom.
Yen Press is an American manga, graphic novel and light novel publisher co-owned by Kadokawa Corporation and Hachette Book Group. It published Yen Plus, a monthly comic anthology, between 2008 and 2013. In addition to translated material, Yen Press has published original series, most notably Svetlana Chmakova's Nightschool and a manga adaptation of James Patterson's Maximum Ride.
All Nippon Air Line is a one-shot Japanese manga written and illustrated by Kei Azumaya. It is licensed in North America by Digital Manga Publishing, which released the manga through its imprint, Juné, on February 26, 2008.
Bara is a colloquialism for a genre of Japanese art and media known within Japan as gay manga (ゲイ漫画) or gei komi. The genre focuses on male same-sex love, as created primarily by gay men for a gay male audience. Bara can vary in visual style and plot, but typically features masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair, akin to bear or bodybuilding culture. While bara is typically pornographic, the genre has also depicted romantic and autobiographical subject material, as it acknowledges the varied reactions to homosexuality in modern Japan.
Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre is a 2010 anthology about Boys Love (BL) and the Boys Love fandom edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti.
Doujinshi (同人誌), also romanized as dōjinshi, is the Japanese term for self-published print works, such as magazines, manga, and novels. Part of a wider category of doujin (self-published) works, doujinshi are often derivative of existing works and created by amateurs, though some professional artists participate in order to publish material outside the regular industry.
Blue Lynx is a Japanese anime label and subsidiary of Fuji TV. Founded in 2019, the label produces boys' love (yaoi) anime films exclusively.