The Comic *Not Human* Has a Million Fans. Why Still No Profit? | 100 Entrepreneurs

In other words, is it impossible to commercialize an ACG (anime, comics and games) work with no strong plot?

"100 Entrepreneurs" is a new column from QDaily. We're interested in people who want to make something happen, and in their creativity, so we're sharing their stories with you.

In October 2016, the official Weibo account for Not Human (《非人哉》) reached one million followers — the payoff of more than a year of "diligent" updating since the first comic went up on August 21, 2015.

As the title suggests, these are stories about non-humans: "The gods, immortals and demons of myth and legend have moved with the times into modern life. They still have their powers, but they no longer hide themselves — they live peacefully alongside mortals, and all the stories take place inside this extraordinary everyday life."

Not Human has no strong plot. It draws one warm, funny scene of daily life after another. It is a "strip comic" (the tall, vertically scrolling format suited to reading on a phone), updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, each update made up of two four-panel strips.

The gods and demons may have illustrious pedigrees, but they are given ACG personalities, and the mismatch is what makes them endearing. "Jiuyue" ("September"), for instance, is a nine-tailed fox with nine fluffy tails, whose looks and manner are full of boyish energy — but who is in fact a girl. Her friend "Xiaoyu" is the Jade Rabbit from the heavens, styled as a ribbon-wearing little girl, who turns terrifying when something upsets her (say, when Chang'e calls her over to eat mooncakes again). Then there is Guanyin, called "Dashi," male, quietly scheming, whose great hobby is keeping creatures with seriously off-putting looks.

The rest of the cast works the same way: the proud, prickly pretty boy "Nezha"; the suit-wearing dragon prince "Lielie"; Erlang Shen's hound, simply named "Xiaotian"; and so on.

The character designs in Not Human follow the style of Japanese manga, but to build the "Chinese look" that stories about deities need, the color palette borrows from traditional ink-wash painting — more saturated than ink wash, less saturated than the colors modern color comics tend to use — and it leans on irregular, broken lines. In short, it feels soft to look at, and soothing.

Here are the two earliest panels.

In fact, some of the "strip comics" that have taken off on Weibo as big accounts tend to share these same traits: everyday, funny, easy. You are scrolling Weibo, you hit an update, you tap to enlarge the image, and you may be finished in a few seconds — like most of the "fragmented" content on Weibo.

Not Human's original goal was simply to build a big content account. It was not born inside an animation company but inside a company called Fenzi Hudong, founded in 2012, which until then had done nothing but social media marketing. Its founders are a pair of cousins, Xu Bo and Xu Ding, who came from traditional media and from design firms, respectively.

In 2015, Xu Bo and Xu Ding decided to try moving into content — to make an IP of their own. "In the last two years the environment for original content has kept getting better, and in marketing skills, experience and capital, we had reached the point where the timing was right," Xu Bo said. Fenzi Hudong's marketing business has grown steadily. Its clients include Tencent and Perfect World, and revenue has risen every year; last year's total came close to 10 million yuan.

Xu Bo told QDaily they had realized that content was still where the value lay. And over the past two years, the number of companies that have tried to create "an IP" is probably not small. 2015 was the year IP became a red-hot buzzword: web novels, comics and the like would build up enough popularity, then get adapted into TV dramas, films and games, squeezing the most commercial value out of a story.

Fenzi Hudong chose to start with comics — in fact that was the only option they could find. Other formats were too far from writing web fiction and doing Weibo marketing. Light novels are only marginally popular in China, and some young readers "only like reading comics."

More importantly, Fenzi Hudong had comics talent in house. Not Human's lead artist, "Yiwang Kongqi," graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and had been the company's illustrator. In mid-2015 the company ran an internal round of comic pitches, and the everyday-life story about deities that Yiwang Kongqi came up with stood out.

With Yiwang Kongqi at its center, Fenzi Hudong built a creative team for Not Human that now runs to 20 people — 70% on creation, 30% on operations. They hold one creative meeting a week and settle that week's storyline in it. Not Human follows the real calendar: when a holiday comes around, they draw a story to match.

Not Human picked up a following quickly, adding anywhere from tens of thousands to well over a hundred thousand followers a month. Some comic accounts reposted its Weibo updates. But Xu Bo said they never paid for promotion — those artists "read it, liked it, and shared it."

Fans are the foundation an "IP" is built on. But through this six-month-plus stretch of "accumulating fans," Not Human brought in almost no revenue. The company has 40 people, split evenly between marketing and comics, and it is the former that keeps everyone fed.

Reading the comic brings in nothing on its own. Posting it on Weibo is free. To reach more readers, Not Human has also licensed reprints to several popular comic platforms, including U17, Kuaikan Comics and NetEase Comics. U17 had already started running a paid-membership system, but as a non-exclusive title Not Human could not possibly "go VIP" there; at most it could pick up some "very limited" monthly-ticket tips.

By the first half of 2016, Not Human's follower count was approaching a million. From Weibo's backend user data, Fenzi Hudong pulled a profile of its fans: "80% female; concentrated between 12 and 34 years old, especially 19 to 24; mostly from the ACG and near-ACG community; concentrated in first-tier cities."

Not Human got its first payback from readers through a print book. In April, Fenzi Hudong ran a crowdfunding campaign on Modian, which was both publicity and a test of how much readers were willing to spend. Xu Bo told QDaily the campaign's floor was 50,000 yuan — reach that, and the book would go ahead. To everyone's delight, it was reached three hours after launch. Over the following month 2,398 fans took part and the campaign raised more than 300,000 yuan. Backers could choose support tiers of 1 yuan, 58 yuan, 288 yuan and up to 799 yuan, each with different merchandise attached.

In June the Not Human print book came out, with a first run of 100,000 copies, and it sold well. Xu Bo told QDaily that book royalties plus the crowdfunding brought in revenue in the millions of yuan — roughly enough to cover what the company spends on people.

But Not Human is still some distance from turning a profit.

It has never sold film or TV rights to anyone — and in China's so-called IP world, when people ask "how much is an IP worth," what they are mostly asking is how much its film and TV rights are worth. Over the past two years, as some adaptations have succeeded in the market, film and TV companies have been willing to pay more and more to grab rights.

Several very popular Weibo comics may soon get live-action versions. Zhonghui Yingshi, a company mainly in rights and investment, announced in September that it had acquired the adaptation rights to the boys'-love comic 《19 天》 (19 Days) and would make a web-series version with Fengmang Wenhua — the company backed by Enlight Media and run by Chai Jidan, producer of 《上瘾》 (Addicted).

19 Days was first serialized on Weibo in 2013 and is one of the most popular strip comics on the platform. Its author, "Old Xian," now has more than 4.1 million Weibo followers.

"Old Xian" and "Tan Jiu" (of the yuri comic 《SQ》) are both members of Muxingshe, a comics studio in Hangzhou.

Besides 19 Days, Zhonghui Yingshi also bought two Kuaikan-exclusive comics by the author "Youling" ("Ghost"): 《快把我哥带走》 (Take My Brother Away) and 《头条都是他》 (He's Always the Headline). The first is about the daily life of a brother and sister, the second about the comic daily lives of three idols.

Zhonghui Yingshi has not disclosed what it paid. But it may have spent a lot on 19 Days — its press release made a point of saying the rights had been "fiercely fought over by a large number of film and TV companies."

"They have their own way of doing things," Xu Bo told QDaily. "Take My Brother Away suits a live-action adaptation better."

Not Human is genuinely hard to adapt into live action: its fantasy elements demand expensive special effects, yet it is also a cute slice-of-life story with no script foundation for a big-budget production.

Xu Bo also knows his team lacks the ability to write "stronger plots." Film and TV scripts are not their specialty, he said, unless they can bring in an established director or screenwriter — but one reason film and TV companies buy IP stories in the first place is that their own creative ability is weak.

As for animated films, Xu Bo said the animation arms of several big companies have already come to them — and they said no. The reason is simple: they are afraid of ending up with a bad film.

An animated film could of course carry Not Human into a more mainstream market. 《十万个冷笑话》 (One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes) only became truly profitable after its film came out, taking 120 million yuan at the box office, while the spin-off mobile game was pulling in 5 million yuan a day in player spending. The catch is that all of that rested on the film winning good word of mouth.

Xu Bo reckons that filming Not Human's adult-oriented fantasy material properly would take "over 100 million yuan," and that "if you throw in twenty or thirty million and just knock something out," you might not even be able to guarantee basic visual quality — better not to make it at all.

Their worry is plainly about the fans. Xu Bo put it in one line: "An IP is very easy to ruin" — "a good IP is easily ruined by careless licensing and by crude versions of it in other formats."

Fans' goodwill is easy to destroy. If Not Human became a "domestic animation" people mock, the good word of mouth it lives on would take a hit.

For the same reason — how fans would feel — Not Human has not taken advertising yet. Xu Bo said their attitude for now is "cautious": they want an approach clients will accept and fans will not resent.

We discussed this once in a piece about Bilibili's funding: some young ACG users believe commerce is evil. 19 Days and 《SQ》 are serialized only on Weibo and can make money through commercial promotion. Muxingshe takes commercial ads in comic form, and a single ad can reach several hundred thousand yuan. The response to those ads cuts both ways: some readers do not mind, others are put off. Under the Zhihu question "What do you think of Muxingshe?", quite a few answers call it something like "a commercial outfit flying the flag of dreams and comic fandom."

On the other side, some brands have already shown interest in what Not Human does next.

With live action and animated film both off the table for now, Fenzi Hudong wants to do it themselves — to make an "instant-noodle anime" version of Not Human.

The instant-noodle anime comes from Japan. It refers to the short animations that have multiplied there in the past couple of years: theme song included, they run 3 to 6 minutes, about the time it takes a viewer to make a bowl of instant noodles, which is how they got the name.

In 2010 only 3 instant-noodle anime aired in Japan; in 2011 it was 6; last year more than 18. In China, more and more animations are choosing this format too — U17's One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes, Yixiazhifeng's 《那年那兔那些事儿》 (Year Hare Affair), Tencent Animation's 《尸兄》 (Corpse Brother), and others.

But the reasons the format caught on in China and in Japan are not the same. We looked at this in a piece on China-Japan animation partnerships: domestic production capacity still trails Japan's by a wide margin. For Japan, instant-noodle anime is an alternative business model or a marketing tactic. In China, it is what you do when you have no choice.

Big companies with capital behind them, like Tencent Animation, can hire Japanese teams and enter the territory of conventional story-driven series (20 minutes and up). For the many smaller companies, a team's production capacity is a very hard obstacle to get past.

Fenzi Hudong is no exception. An instant-noodle anime is the only thing they could currently make under their own power. Ordinary animation costs roughly 20,000 yuan a minute to produce. If each Not Human episode ran 3 minutes, taking out the opening and closing credits would leave a little over a minute of actual content. That would let them put out something weekly, or even 2 to 3 times a week, closer to a variety show. (The perfect form of instant-noodle anime is in fact the daily release, like 《齐木楠雄的灾难》, The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. — but that, too, is beyond them for now.)

They also do not want investment from other big companies, video platforms among them, so that whatever earnings come later stay whole.

Which means they need their own source of money.

Not long ago, Fenzi Hudong raised 10 million yuan from EMC, a culture fund aimed at Chinese companies, backed by the private equity firm TPG and the talent agency CAA. The money will mostly go toward making the company bigger. The marketing business will keep growing; meanwhile, production of the Not Human animation is already being prepared.

They have put together a small early team of a few people, planning to use the four-panel comics as a base to make a pilot first, and then decide the next step — whether it makes more sense to find an outsourced team or hire their own.

If the instant-noodle anime works, Not Human could go further down the IP road — more viewers, more affection, a little closer to a "mainstream" that is not only an ACG audience. Then the revenue models Xu Bo has in mind — product placement, character licensing, merchandise — would work.

Brands' greater interest in animation may also come from the belief that video has more room for an audience than comics do.

The comic itself, in fact, may already find it hard to grow its fan base in any qualitative way. A slice-of-life comic has a hard time manufacturing a new peak through content alone, the way a romance comic can with a kissing-scene chapter. (It could try shifting its art style, of course, but that brings the question of how fans would feel right back.)

Fenzi Hudong is feeling out other directions. Not Human's spin-off comic 《1031》 launched in October, drawn by another staffer, @Lingzi Hai You Chao. Named after the date of Halloween, it tells stories about Western monsters — werewolves, vampires and the rest — living in China, a Western counterpart to Not Human.

Standing on Not Human's base, 《1031》 has already drawn 110,000 followers. But its premise leans too heavily on being a spin-off, and what it can achieve on its own is still unclear.

As for the more important instant-noodle anime, there is still no concrete timeline.

For now, before any of this can land, what Fenzi Hudong needs first is to keep Not Human updating, day in and day out.

Cover image: the Not Human playlist page on Missevan