MangaKit is coming
My friend Tony Leonard is turning his comics workflow into software.
Update, 22 August 2026: Both halves shipped. Read the follow-up.
My friend Tony Leonard has been quietly building something, and it finally has a name on it: MangaKit.
Tony is the real thing. Games-industry vet from his Tokyo years, comic work in Heavy Metal, and the creator of Cyberfunks and METADEATH, which you can read right now. In his own words, he has been quietly drawing, coding, and building tools to speed up workflows for fellow artists. That sentence should sound familiar to anyone who knows this studio.
MangaKit started life as his comic-creation library: lettering balloons, screentones, onomatopoeia, page templates, the working kit behind his own pages. Now it is growing into software. MangaKit Composer is the app. And days after announcing it, he revealed the second piece: MangaKit Reader, which he intends to release for free, built around a native .MKBook format for sharing your book, collaborating, and putting what he calls a digital ashcan in front of readers.
That is about everything he has said publicly so far, and honestly, that is enough for me. Tools built by a working artist for his own workflow are a very specific kind of good. The love shows up in the details because the maker has to live with them.
Keep an eye on his Gumroad, where Reader is set to land first, and his channel for what comes next. And go read METADEATH.