Oni to Publish ‘Covenant,’ Webtoon with 630K Followers

Oni Press will publish LySandra Vuong’s Covenant, a dark supernatural action/fantasy/romance that currently runs on the Webtoon platform, where it has over 636,000 followers and 21 million views. The story centers on Erza, an exorcist who has no faith in God but is nonetheless assigned to protect a human boy, Sunny, from evil forces. Although he seems normal, Sunny has a dark past, and there’s a reason why the demons are after him. The two are drawn toward each other, despite their differences, but the mission is a struggle for both. The story has a heavy fantasy element drawn from traditional Catholicism, with exorcists fighting evil with machine guns and magical tattoos. Oni will publish the story in three volumes, reformatting the webtoons to fit a 6” x 9” trim size. The first volume, which collects the first 18 episodes of the webtoon, will go on sale on April 24, 2024, as a 208-page paperback with an MSRP of $24.99.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Vuong explaned why she launched the story as a webtoon: “A few years ago, in a time where many publishers still frowned upon manga-inspired art styles, I thought the only place for my story would be the wild west of webcomics, where all sorts of wacky and weird comics live.”

“Covenant takes the exorcist sub-genre that has made stories like Constantine so beloved into a refreshing and modern direction with action sequences that recall the flare of shounen manga like Blue Exorcist and the slow burn romance of a Kaori Yuki or CLAMP series,” added Oni Press Editor-in-Chief Sierra Hahn.