OKAY, YES, I’m one of those people.

I was a victim of “Robotech”—an innocent 11-year-old, sneaking in a couple of minutes with the black-and-white TV when I ought to have been dressing for school. My lasting impressions from my first, fateful episode: “Harmony Gold” was the most beautiful name for a company I had ever heard in my life, and oh-my-god they let Roy Fokker die.

I had never seen such a thing. Cartoons were for kids, and so obviously nobody was supposed to be dying, here; not unless they were a mouse-obsessed cat, able to swallow lit dynamite and come back spry and running, or bounce coyote-like from a canyon floor. But this Fokker guy died and did not return, and other people cried over him and missed him and had to learn to move on. These Harmony Gold/Tatsunoko Productions people respected my intelligence!

I was hooked.

I became one of them: a fangirl, a manga geek, an avid devourer of “them big-eyed cartoons.” I have watched other people’s pre-licensed Chinatown bootlegs with no subtitles, squinting through video snow thick enough to shovel. I have forked over amounts on eBay that have frightened me. I have gone as far as Tokyo (yeah, Tokyo, Japan) to complete my collection of Banana Fish when I realized I could not go another month without knowing whether Ash Lynx would ultimately live or die—this despite the fact that my grasp of kanji is nonexistent and my stockpile of Japanese verbs only slightly less so—I get by on hiragana, pictures, and prayer.

I admit it: I have attended a con. In a schoolgirl uniform. In my defense, at least it wasn’t “sailor fuku.” (Essentially, I had on a tie and a skirt.)

Let’s face it—Japan’s manga and anime subculture has been an astoundingly successful ambassador for the country. Of course no one thing, be it a book of literature, a brief trip, or a sociology course, can give you a scholar’s or a native’s feel for an entire nation of people, but because of these angsty long-legged, large-eyed characters there are real aspects of Japanese life and culture that have become general knowledge internationally, and a real affection that has sprouted in many corners of the world. It’s gotten to the point where Japan’s minister for foreign affairs, recognizing the medium’s reach and scope, has proposed an award, roughly equivalent to a Nobel Prize, to honor up-and-coming global (i.e., non-Japanese) manga artists, to encourage more of an international feeling of “connection with Japan.”

If only more cultures would make themselves as accessible.

Enter Netcomics.

Japan’s not the only place expressing itself via these stylized sequential drawings—frankly, it never has been. Still, for decades, if you walked into your average American comic shop looking for anything that was, well, not American, aside from a few extremely highbrow French titles at the back of the shop Japanese was pretty much all you were going to get. Others trickled in, but typically you’d get two or three of the monthly issues and the series would stop, unfinished. Companies like Tokyopop have provided a few offerings, but these were always dwarfed by their Japanese selection. As late as a couple of years ago, the only non-Japanese Asian title I could find on a casual browse through my local store was a three-book sci-fi series called K.I.L.L. (this title seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth) about an alien-controlled, raygun-dominated, futuristic dystopia in which all women have been annihilated, and tales of them are used to frighten and disgust children. As a woman, I wasn’t exactly drawn to this.

Yet lately I’ve noticed that a different sort of graphic novel has been multiplying (first gradually, and then like freaking bunnies) on the more-prominent shelves of my trusted local shops. The names are distinctly Korean, the art is subtly different (heavy on the pastels), and in contrast to Tokyopop’s “100 Percent Authentic!” standard, the books read from left to right.

And now I know why. Just this year, Netcomics has burst onto the scene with 12 titles available as of June 2006 and far more planned—10 per month in 2007, a veritable manwha explosion.

“Manwha” means “comics” (or “graphic novels” to us fanfolk). It’s the Korean cognate of the Japanese word “manga” and the Chinese “manhua”; the same Chinese characters can be used to write the word in all three languages. Netcomics is here, and it’s making noise. Its goal is to “provide great comic book content to book readers and Internet users of the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.”

What makes Netcomics unique is its business model: Rather than wait a few months at a time for the paperback release, readers can go online in advance to access their favorite titles for just $1.00 a volume, with the first chapter of each title available free. This won’t, of course, stop collectors who take pride in neatly stacked series lining their shelves, or people like me, who buy out of sheer compulsion; customers can easily get their feet wet with a small purchase and spring for the physical version of a book when they’re sure they like it.

Netcomics’ parent company, the Seoul-based Ecomix, is a top online comics publisher with an inventory of more than 40,000 volumes, which bodes well for the future availability of a variety of translated series. The two Netcomics titles I’m engrossed in so far are Pine Kiss, by Eunhee Lee, and Let Dai, by Sooyeon Won.