Our Mission

Last updated: January 2026 · Author: Giovanni Picaro

Most “mission statements” are written by marketing departments and contain phrases like “we strive to deliver world-class experiences.” This is not that kind of page. What follows is the actual reason this site exists, written by the person who started it, with the goals we measure ourselves against and the principles we refuse to compromise on.

The problem we exist to solve

Manga, manhua, and manhwa are the most read narrative medium of the early twenty-first century. One Piece alone has sold more than 500 million copies. The webtoon industry generates billions in revenue annually. Translated editions are now standard at every major bookstore in the English-speaking world.

And yet, the critical conversation around these works in English remains shockingly thin. Most “reviews” are episode recaps with no analysis. Most “guides” are aggregated lists copied from MyAnimeList. The handful of serious publications that take the form seriously — we love them, and link to them — cannot possibly cover everything that matters.

Our mission is to add a small, careful, opinionated voice to that conversation. To write the kind of reviews and features that we ourselves wanted to read when we first fell into this medium and could not find anything that treated it with the seriousness it deserves.

Our five principles

1. Treat the work as literature

We approach manga, manhua, and manhwa the way a serious literary publication approaches novels: with attention to craft, theme, voice, structural choices, and historical context. Berserk is not “a fantasy comic with violence.” It is a four-decade meditation on causality, agency, and the human cost of power. We write about it accordingly.

2. Earn the reader’s trust by deserving it

Every claim we make should be verifiable. Every fact should have a source. Every opinion should be argued. Every conflict of interest should be disclosed. Trust is the only thing a small editorial publication actually has to sell, and it is built one careful article at a time and lost in a single sloppy one. See our Editorial Standards for the full code we follow.

3. Cultural humility before cultural authority

We are an Italian-rooted team writing about works originally created in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. We read these languages to varying degrees, work with translators we trust, and constantly defer to native scholars and creators when the question requires it. We will never pretend to a level of cultural authority we have not earned, and we will always tell you when we are operating at the edge of our expertise.

4. The editorial wall stays standing

Advertisers and commercial partners do not influence what we publish. Not by suggestion, not by implication, not even by the friendly relationship that develops when you work with people for years. When a commercial relationship exists with a publisher we are reviewing, we disclose it. When a product is provided to us for free for review, we disclose it. When a link is an affiliate link, we disclose it. See our Affiliate Disclosure for the legal version.

5. Respect for the people who make the work

Mangaka, manhuajia, and webtoonists work brutally hard to produce the stories we love. They deserve respect even when their work disappoints us, and they deserve a critical conversation that does not collapse into either uncritical fandom or contemptuous dismissal. We will criticize a work when criticism is warranted, but we will never punch down at a working creator. There is a meaningful difference between “this manga is not for me, and here is why” and “this author is a fool.”

What we measure

Mission statements without measurable goals are decoration. Here are the actual numbers we hold ourselves to in 2026:

• At least 80% of long-form reviews on our site are written by team members who have read the work in question to completion, or to the most recent meaningful checkpoint for ongoing series.
• 100% of factual claims in published articles are sourced. Where the source is the work itself, we cite the volume and chapter. Where the source is external, we link directly to it.
• All corrections are publicly logged on the article, with the date and the nature of the correction. See our Corrections Policy.
• Mean response time to reader emails: under 72 hours for general queries, under 48 hours for DMCA notices, under 30 days for GDPR requests (we usually do better than the legal window).
• Zero AI-generated articles published as if written by humans. We are explicit about this in our AI Usage Policy.

What we will not do

A mission is also defined by what falls outside it. To remove ambiguity:

• We will not chase trending topics for their own sake. If a series is hyped but does not interest us, we will not pretend otherwise to capture search traffic.
• We will not publish articles generated by language models and dressed up as human criticism. If we use AI for translation help or organizational work, we say so.
• We will not run “honest” reviews of products provided by manufacturers in exchange for friendly coverage. The pattern is too well established to be ethical even with disclosure.
• We will not pretend that this medium is uniformly excellent. Plenty of manga is forgettable; some is bad; some is actively offensive. We say so when we encounter it.
• We will not gatekeep the medium. New readers are welcome, and our Reader’s Guide exists specifically to lower the entry barrier.

The next five years

By the time Scanhua celebrates its tenth anniversary in autumn 2030, we want to have built three things: a reference library of long-form reviews and features that genuinely repays a reader’s attention; a glossary and guide infrastructure that helps newcomers find their footing; and a reputation among publishers, creators, and serious fans as a publication that can be trusted to handle the work with care, even when the verdict is not kind.

If we are still here in five years, still writing carefully, still correcting our own mistakes publicly, still refusing to bend the editorial wall — we will consider the mission accomplished, and we will set new goals.

Related pages: About Us · Editorial Standards · Methodology · Corrections Policy · Our Team