28 Facts About Joey Manley

Joey Manley was an American LGBT fiction author, web designer, and webcomics publisher.

Joey Manley moved to San Francisco in 2000 in order to work in web design.

Joey Manley was the founder and publisher of the Modern Tales family of webcomics websites, which included Modern Tales, Serializer, Girlamatic, Webcomics Nation, and others.

Joey Manley is considered one of the "founding pioneers" of the webcomic movement for creating a then-revolutionary subscription model.

Joey Manley had cultivated hundreds of relationships within webcomic circles and successfully brought webcomic creators together following the dot-com bubble.

Joey Manley returned to creative writing again in the early 2010s, serializing his novel Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince: a Gay Superhero Teen Romance online.

Joey Manley died of pneumonia in November 2013 at the age of 48.

In 2000, Joey Manley moved to San Francisco, where he worked for Streaming Media and served as the first webmaster for Free Speech TV.

Joey Manley soon began recruiting artists for a for-profit, subscription-based webcomics collective, which he launched in March 2002 as Modern Tales.

At the time, Joey Manley hoped the subscription model would increase the visibility of everyone involved in the project, even if each webcomic would have only drawn a niche interest individually.

Joey Manley had moved to Louisville, Kentucky at this point in order to cut costs.

Joey Manley started multiple subscription-based webcomic anthology sites in the early-2000s, such as Serializer, Girlamatic, and Graphic Smash.

Joey Manley published single-webcomic subscription sites like Hernandez' Rumble Girls and James Kochalka's American Elf.

In 2003, Joey Manley began co-hosting a podcast with Lea Hernandez titled The Diva Lea Show.

Joey Manley started Webcomics Nation in 2005, a webcomic hosting service.

Joey Manley told Comic Book Resources in 2007 that his editorial subscription services would remain largely unchanged, though that he was doing away with the subscription model as online advertisement and merchandising were becoming more viable.

Joey Manley moved to New York City in order to work on the project and was known to be very enthusiastic about it, but ComicSpace never fully took off.

In 2011, Joey Manley began serializing a second novel online as a work-in-progress.

All of Joey Manley's remaining webcomic services shut down in April 2013.

Joey Manley stated that he went with subscription models for his early projects because online advertising rates were low and bandwidth was very expensive at the time.

Joey Manley felt the need to defend his business model a lot because the subscription model was unpopular among some ideological groups, and he quickly became known as "the subscriptions guy" in his community.

However, as advertising revenue increased, Joey Manley began adopting that model more in his services.

Joey Manley noted that he would have wanted to get into the print market as well, but was not able to afford it.

On November 7,2013, Joey Manley died of complications from pneumonia in a hospital in Louisville.

Joey Manley received the title of Kentucky Colonel for his entrepreneurial efforts and his free speech advocacy.

Joey Manley was listed by Comixpedia as one of the most influential people in webcomics from 2004 to 2006.

Josh Roberts stated that Joey Manley was particularly apt at communicating with people, cultivating hundreds of relationships within the field.

Joey Manley's death was commemorated by figures such as Scott McCloud, Lea Hernandez, and Joshua Hale Fialkov.