Image credit: publishersweekly
As reported by Publishers Weekly, famous K-pop bands – BTS, ENHYPHEN, and Tomorrow X – will debut in comic shops across North America. It will be a trio of full-color comics from IZE Press, a Korean comics imprint of manga giant Yen Press.
In 2022, the BTS and their studios HYBE released a webtoon comic, 7Fates: Chako. The webcomic garnered 15 million views in just two days, breaking all records and becoming the highest-viewed title ever launched by Webtoon. The title was followed by Enhypen’s Dark Moon: The Blood Altar and Tomorrow X Together: The Star Seekers, with all three getting more than 70 million views in one month. These three webcomics are coming to print for New York Comic Con this fall.
Mark de Vera, sales and marketing director at Yen Press, says:
“The team of IZE Press (the Korean comics imprint of Yen Press) went to great lengths to make HYBE graphic novels (print edition) special by adding pull-out posters, covers with special effects, and exclusive bonus content.”
Produced by South Korean entertainment company HYBE Corporation and released as full-color, vertical-scrolling digital comics on Webtoon, the stories present the members of the HYBE-managed bands in fantasy, supernatural, and action/adventure settings.
David Lee, v-p of content at Webtoon, says:
“K-pop fans love to know everything about a band, its history, and the stories behind the stories for songs and albums. This process of mythologizing and building stories around artists is part of what fans want. Many comics do the same thing, building universes with arcs and casts of characters who have adventures and perhaps develop over time.”
The first volume of 7 Fates: Chakho will arrive in stores on October 24. Produced in collaboration with REDICE Studio, it is a surprisingly dark action-fantasy story featuring BTS members as hunters in a dystopian world where fierce tiger-people, Beom, threatened to destroy mankind.
Following this, the Star Seekers is a light-hearted modern fantasy tale featuring members of Tomorrow x Together. Its first volume will be in stores on November 14. The story is set in a world where top pop idols have flashy magical powers. It imagines TxT members as a band struggling in the entertainment world because all five lack supernatural abilities. But an incident unlocks each member’s dormant powers, and they have to find out how to create a new kind of synergy in their songs and save the world in the process.
The third HYBE-produced graphic novel series – Dark Moon: The Blood Altar – will hit stores on December 12. It features ENHYPHEN as students in a boarding school who hide their true identities as vampires. They deal with a gang of werewolf boys from a rival school and the arrival of a new student, a girl who also possesses mysterious powers and secrets.
In these stories, the characters have different names and backstories than their onstage persons. It’s not stated explicitly, but most K-pop fans believe that these webtoon stories are a way to keep fans engaged when bands go on hiatus. This is common with K-pop boy bands, mostly because South Korea’s young men aged 18-28 must serve as a soldier for 18-21 months. This is the case with K-pop megastars BTS, who currently have two members, Jin and J-Hope, serving their time as soldiers, with the other members reportedly soon to follow.
“We were thrilled to witness the excitement for these releases live and in person when we exhibited at KCON in Los Angeles this past August. We cannot wait for many more fans to have that same excitement when they finally hold 7Fates: Chakho, The Star Seekers, and Dark Moon in their hands!” – said de Vera.
Navkiran Dhaliwal is a seasoned content writer with 10+ years of experience. When she's not writing, she can be found cooking up a storm or spending time with her dog, Rain.
