Manta, the subscription-only webtoon site, will adapt The Bromance Book Club, by best-selling author Lyssa Kay Adams, into its vertical-scroll comics format. The novel, the first in what has become a five-book series, centers on a group of high achievers who get together to read romance novels. In the first book, a baseball player whose wife wants a divorce turns to the group and their current read, a steamy Regency romance, for help. The novel was first published in 2019 and was the Amazon Book Review’s pick for the top romance novel that year; the film rights have been optioned by Netflix, and the fifth book in the series debuted on the USA Today best-seller list. Manta will start running the graphic adaptation on September 3, 2023.

Most of Manta’s content comes from Korean properties, but they have been acquiring more titles from elsewhere (see “ICv2 Interview: Moonseok Jeong, Manta COO & Head of Content”). And while they have been slower than other publishers to bring their webtoons to print, they are starting to move in that direction as well, with print editions coming from Ize Press (see “Exclusive: Ize Press Licenses ‘Finding Camellia’ Webtoon”) and Inklore (see “PRH Announces ‘Global Comics’ Imprint, Inklore”).