Joey Manley, American publisher, founded Modern Tales (b. 1965)
Joey Manley (July 1965 – November 7, 2013) was an American LGBT fiction author, web designer, and webcomics publisher. Manley wrote the successful LGBT novel The Death of Donna-May Dean in 1992. He moved to San Francisco in 2000 in order to work in web design. Manley was the founder and publisher of the Modern Tales family of webcomics websites, which included Modern Tales, Serializer, Girlamatic, Webcomics Nation, and others. Manley is considered one of the "founding pioneers" of the webcomic movement for creating a then-revolutionary subscription model.Manley was well-regarded within the webcomic community. He had cultivated hundreds of relationships within webcomic circles and successfully brought webcomic creators together following the dot-com bubble. Manley returned to creative writing again in the early 2010s, serializing his novel Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince: a Gay Superhero Teen Romance online. Manley died of pneumonia in November 2013 at the age of 48.