In what is sure to come as welcome news to her legion of fans, award-winning, best-selling digital comics creator Leeanne Krecic has just announced the launch of a brand new series, The Dragon King Oath, set to debut on Manta, a subscription-based digital comics platform, in 2024. The series is set in an elaborate fantasy world featuring (spoilers!) dragons, kings and oaths involving captive princesses. It promises to be a complete departure from her breakout Webtoon workplace romantic comedy, Let’s Play, while offering plenty of the romance, wit, intelligence, plot twists and character interplay that turned that series into one of the medium’s biggest hits.
“Dragon King Oath is a romantic fantasy comic and it leans on the trope of beauty and the beast, but not in the way you think,” said Krecic in an exclusive interview. “People usually associate the female protagonist as beauty. In this case, it’s the other way around. In this world, humans and dragons are periodically at war, so there’s a lot of animosity between the two. Humans have a lot of ugly opinions of dragons which can make them seem very cruel and unforgiving, whereas dragons are immortal; they play the long game and they are peaceful.”
The story takes off over a conflict where a king, abiding by an ancient oath, is forced to make peace with a dragon residing in his territory by offering one of his daughters, a headstrong young princess. The premise sets up a storyline expected to run 100 weekly episodes, available along with the rest of Manta’s content library as part of a monthly subscription fee.
Though the larger themes reflecting how hatred can arise from historical misunderstandings, fear and miscommunication are at once eternal and depressingly current, The Dragon King Oath feels far removed from the world of workplace gender politics that struck such a chord with Let’s Play. Krecic said that, in spite of the differences, it will still contain her trademark motifs.
“Expect a slow burn romance,” she said. “That’s what I adore. And humor. I struggle to tell a completely and fully straight faced story without making fun of tropes.” She says there won’t be any “meta” or breaking of the fourth wall, but readers can expect a “feel good story” to unfold over the next two-plus years.
Those creative touches helped Krecic achieve one of the signature success stories in comics in the past decade. A lifelong fan who took a decade-long professional detour in the technology industry, she was one of the first North American creators to find her voice and her audience in the new (outside of Asia) medium of vertically-scrolling webtoons designed to be read on mobile phones. Her story of a woman trying to make it in the male-dominated world of videogame development struck a nerve with a younger, mostly female audience who finally got to see their interests, attitudes and genre preferences reflected in a widely-distributed comic series. Let’s Play has been optioned for media development, and printed collections have reached the best-seller lists.
Krecic says she regrets having to set the Let’s Play story aside unfinished, and says she hopes to return to wind it up someday. Last year she made a very public exit from the Webtoon platform where Let’s Play had racked up millions of subscribers and tens of millions of views, over a dispute over marketing and expectations. “We tried to discuss my return and we didn’t come to an agreement on it,” she said.
She says Manta, which was launched in late 2020 by a Korean company called RIDI, gave her the creator ownership and support she was looking for.
“The nice thing about Manta is that it’s like Netflix
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Krecic clarified that The Dragon King Oath does not contain material inappropriate for kids, but it is more likely to be appreciated by more sophisticated readers. “I don’t expect there to be any sex or hooking up,” she said, “but slightly older readers are more likely to get into the worldbuilding and the humor.”
Krecic said she hopes that many of her fans will follow her to the new platform – not just for her own work, but for the library of over 400 original and licensed comics (20,000+ total episodes, according to the company) currently available on Manta’s app. Certainly Manta is hoping for that as well. As a recent entrant into an increasingly crowded market dominated by Naver’s Webtoon, Manta says it has seen some momentum with 12 million app downloads as of July, 2023. By allying with Krecic, one of the medium’s biggest English-language stars, they are clearly banking that The Dragon King Oath can bring the magic.
Krecic announced the series at a panel at New York Comic Con on Sunday afternoon, October 15.
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