Seven Seas Creates New Label, TOKYOPOP Licenses Manhua, New Publisher Goes Online
As the world of East Asian comics continues to expand, a new niche genre has emerged: baihe, Chinese girls love. Seven Seas Entertainment published its first title in November and has added it to the list of labeled genres on its website, TOKYOPOP recently announced a new license, and a digital publisher started up last year with some series that are worth watching.
Seven Seas’ first baihe novel, The Beauty’s Blade, by Feng Ren Zuo Shu, was released in November 2025 in two versions, a regular and a Crunchyroll exclusive edition, and the publisher has indicated that more licenses are on the way.
Although they didn’t label it as baihe, TOKYOPOP has announced a girls love manhua, She Is Still Cute Today,by Guo Si Te, which it is publishing under its LoveLove imprint. The contemporary high school romance has an opposites-attract plot and is rated for readers 13 and up; it has been adapted into a live-action drama in China. The first volume will be released on July 31, 2026, with an MSRP of $19.99.
And finally, we have a publisher! Baiheverse launched in March 2025 and carries licensed manhua, novels, audiobooks, and videos, including manhua from the Chinese Bilibili website. The publisher is digital only and publishes manhua on its website and Android app, chapter by chapter in either a vertical-scroll or page-by-page format.
Like yuri (Japanese girls love), baihe is a broad term that encompasses different genres; the baihe titles available in English include both fantasy and contemporary romances. There appears to be an active fan community on Reddit, which is where many readers discover new titles, and there are fan translation sites as well, although these appear to be defunct.
Same-sex romances have always been a significant part of the manga market: “We have two bookcases for yaoi/yuri/LGBT manga (as well as manhwa and manhua now) and there is a dedicated fanbase that wishes to support authors whose works they’ve read online,” Sam Lee of Boston’s Comicopia told us during last year’s Webtoon Week (see “Retailers Talk Webtoons“). While yuri (at least in translation) is a newer and smaller genre than yaoi, it has a strong fandom and is carried by mainstream publishers including VIZ Media, Yen Press, and Seven Seas. The highest profile yuri title right now is The Guy She Liked Wasn’t a Guy After All (a.k.a. the “green manga”), which was one of Yen Press’s top five series of the year (see “Yen Press Top Titles of 2025”), alongside Solo Leveling and Delicious in Dungeon.Unlike the other two, The Guy She Liked… doesn’t have an anime yet, which makes its sales even more impressive.
This converges with the growing popularity of Chinese material. Seven Seas started publishing danmei (Chinese fantasy featuring romance between men) prose novels in 2021 and three of the made the New York Times paperback trade fiction best-seller list on the week they were released. These novels have been adapted into comics (see “Seven Seas to Publish ‘Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi’” and also “Inklore to Publish Heaven Offical’s Blessing”). The first volume of Heaven Official’s Blessing made the BookScan Adult Top 20 in December (see “December 2025 Circana BookScan”), and new volumes of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation regularly show up on the Author chart when they are released, so this genre is getting traction in the book channel.
Danmei has one significant advantage over baihe as far as the North American audience is concerned: Adaptations. Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation was adapted into The Untamed, which is on Netflix, while the animated series (donghua) based on Heaven Official’s Blessing is on Crunchyroll (it also ran on Netflix for a while but was removed). Baihe doesn’t have that sort of exposure yet, but given the way yuri manga has grown, it’s definitely a genre worth watching.
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Source: ICv2
