Our Team

Last updated: January 2026

Scanhua is run by four people. We know each other personally, we have worked together for years, and we are accountable to our readers under our actual names and verifiable backgrounds. This page is the public record of who is responsible for what.

Giovanni Picaro — Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Italian, born 1994 in Palagiano (Taranto), based in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Giovanni founded Scanhua in autumn 2020 after spending more than two decades reading manga, beginning with a Star Comics edition of Dragon Ball volume one given to him by his father in 1999, when he was six years old. His professional background is in customer support and editorial project management, and he has spent the last several years running a portfolio of independent web publications across multiple niches, of which Scanhua is the editorial flagship.

His areas of editorial focus are seinen, gekiga, and the historical evolution of the Japanese manga industry from the 1960s onward. He is a particular advocate for the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Naoki Urasawa, and Inio Asano, and writes most of our long-form features on Japanese authorial manga. He attended Comiket as a visiting reader in Tokyo in summer 2019 and considers it a formative experience.

Giovanni handles editor-in-chief responsibilities: editorial planning, final review of all major articles, advertising relationships, DMCA correspondence, and reader communication. He also runs the InkRecap YouTube channel, which produces video summaries of manga and manhwa for new readers. Contact: giovanni [at] scanhua [punto] site or info [at] scanhua [punto] site.

Letizia C. — Manhwa & Webtoon Curator

Italian, in her early thirties, based in Lombardy.

Letizia first met Giovanni in 2014 in an online manga reading group, where she became known for the level of detail she brought to discussions of Solanin, Beck, and other Inio Asano works. Her career took an unexpected turn in 2018 when she relocated to Seoul for an eight-month research stay studying contemporary Korean visual culture; she returned to Italy fluent enough in Korean to read webtoons in their original language and with a deep appreciation for the structural innovations of the format.

She joined Scanhua’s editorial team in 2021 to lead our coverage of manhwa, webtoons, and Korean visual storytelling more broadly. Her writing focuses on the formal differences between traditional manga and the vertical-scroll webtoon format, the rise of regression and isekai genres in Korean fiction, and the emergence of murim and danmei as global commercial forces.

Letizia reviews most webtoons on the site, edits all manhwa-related articles, and curates the manhwa sections of our glossary.

Marco T. — Manhua & Chinese Visual Culture

Italian, late twenties, based in Bologna.

Marco joined the team in late 2022 after several years of writing about Chinese manhua for personal blogs and academic reading groups. He is currently completing graduate studies in sinology at the University of Bologna, with a thesis focus on the literary roots of contemporary xianxia fiction. He reads Mandarin Chinese fluently and has spent multiple research periods in Beijing and Shanghai.

His areas of focus are xianxia, wuxia, danmei, and the broader intersection of Chinese literary traditions with contemporary visual storytelling. He writes our deep-dive features on works like Mo Dao Zu Shi, The Untamed, and the various live-action adaptations of major manhua, and he is the team’s first source of cultural context whenever a Chinese-language work crosses our editorial desk.

Marco also handles our coverage of Chinese animation (donghua) when it directly intersects with manhua adaptations, and he edits all manhua-related articles on the site.

Dario M. — Technical Lead

Italian, mid-thirties, based in Catania.

Dario has known Giovanni since 2017, when they met on a WordPress technical forum where Dario was helping debug a particularly stubborn caching issue. He has spent his professional career as a backend developer for a series of Italian and European tech companies and contributes to Scanhua part-time as our technical lead, handling everything from hosting and CDN configuration to plugin development and security audits.

His role is mostly invisible to readers, which is exactly how he wants it: a website that loads quickly, never breaks, and never leaks data is the website where you do not notice the person who maintains it. He is also the team member who pushes hardest for accessibility and performance: most of the structural improvements we have made to the site over the past two years — faster page loads, better mobile rendering, cleaner semantic HTML — came from his recommendations.

Dario does not write articles for Scanhua, but he reviews any technical claim that appears in our coverage of webtoon platforms, e-reader software, or scanlation tooling.

Why we are not a bigger team

We have considered expanding the team several times. We have decided against it each time, for one specific reason: the editorial quality we want to maintain is hard enough to maintain at four people. At eight, the coordination overhead grows faster than the editorial output, and the standards drift downward almost imperceptibly until you cannot recognize the publication you started with.

We would rather publish less frequently with four careful people than publish more frequently with a rotating cast of eight whose work nobody on the team has time to actually read.

Want to write for us?

We accept guest contributions on a case-by-case basis. We are most interested in hearing from writers who can cover areas we currently underrepresent: yuri, BL, gekiga from outside the canonical names, manhua wuxia from before the xianxia boom, and historically significant works in any of the three traditions that have not received serious English-language coverage.

If you fit one of these descriptions, send a brief introduction and a writing sample (a published or unpublished review of a work you genuinely care about) to info [at] scanhua [punto] site with the subject line Guest contributor inquiry. We do not need a CV. We need to see how you write about something you love or something you find frustrating.

Please note: we do not pay for guest contributions at this time. We do credit clearly, link generously, and treat your work as we treat our own.

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