| Type | Comic publisher |
|---|---|
| Industry | Comics |
| Founded | 1977 |
| Founder(s) | Fang Wan-nan |
| Headquarters | Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China |
| Website | tongli.com.tw (Chinese) |
Tongli Publishing Co. (Chinese: 東立出版社, Hanyu Pinyin: Dōng Lì Chūbǎnshè), most known as Tong Li Comics, is a publishing company which distributes a variety of domestic and imported comics in the Republic of China (Taiwan).
Tong Li was founded in Tainan, Taiwan in 1977 with a mere nine employees.[1] Tong Li entered the publishing business as a comic book pirate. "For fifteen years, Tong Li was the largest producer of pirated comics, redoing more than 1,000 titles in all, and for part of that time, fifty a month."[2]
Tong Li's original method of operation was to procure new comics from Japanese distributors, replacing the Japanese text with traditional Chinese, and "drawing bras on bare-breasted women characters and modifying, up to what they could get away with, explicitly sexual or violent panels".[3] The head of Tong Li, Fang Wan-nan, "jokingly referred to himself as the 'king of pirated comics'".[3]
Despite the pirating trend, Tong Li procured Taiwan's first legal license for Japanese manga with Minako Narita's Cipher from Hakusensha in 1989, and followed with Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira from Kodansha in 1991.[1] A 1992 Taiwanese law forbidding the pirating of comics forced Tong Li to abandon pirating and develop original content in addition to acquiring licenses through legal means, at which point it began publishing the magazines Dragon Youth (龍少年月刊) and Star★Girls (星少女月刊) - titles which retained the considerable influence of Japanese manga.[3] Current licensed manga series includes One Piece, Bleach, Naruto, Eyeshield 21, Gintama, Shijō Saikyō no Deshi Ken'ichi, Skip Beat, and more.