In June 2023, CoryxKenshin uploaded a video to YouTube where he reacted to the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie trailer. As a longtime gaming creator and Five Nights enthusiast, he was pretty stoked to reveal he’d gotten a cameo in the film. Fans swarmed the comments section with congratulations, and the video ended up pulling in nearly 18 million views. His channel overall brought in 100 million views that month. Things were looking good.
Then he vanished.
For the last 18 months, not a single video has gone up on his channel. Not a single Community post. His Twitter account? Silent. For viewers, it was an unexpected absence. CoryxKenshin (aka Cory DeVante Williams) had been on YouTube since 2009, and was a prominent voice for gamers and anime enthusiasts. He’d gained more prominence in 2022, after he challenged YouTube’s moderation team for allegedly playing favorites, and gained support from Markiplier. He hadn’t announced a planned break, so his 16 million subscribers were left wondering—what happened?
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
Well, now they know: Williams returned Dec. 13 with a two-minute video, most of which was an animated trailer for a manga series he’s been working on in secret. The series, called Monsters We Make, debuts Dec. 16.
Its animated trailer features all the classic hallmarks of the Japanese anime series Williams has enthused about for years: a neon-splashed sci-fi city, a ragtag team of heroes, big monsters, and even a bishie or two.
Other than visual details, we don’t have much information on what Monsters We Make will be. Its trailer ends with a whispered tagline, “We all make a choice,” and a snippet of binary code that translates to “SANADA.” The name of the main character? The name of the city? Who knows!
But these easter egg-y teasers have been enough to get fans whipped up; Williams’ video is No. 1 on YouTube’s Trending tab, with over 12 million views. And his subscriber count has shot up by over 500,000 people since the trailer went up, taking him to 19.9 million.
As for Williams himself, he didn’t speak much during the video, and didn’t explain his absence. “Hey everyone,” he said, entering frame and peering around his recording studio like he, too, hadn’t seen it for a while. “I hope you’ve been well over this long period of time of us not seeing each other. Praise god, it is good to finally be back.”
Manga and anime have huge fanbases online, and while they’ve always had a foothold with fans in the west, they’ve been gaining more mainstream attention over the past few years—enough that streamers like Netflix have produced big-budget live-action adaptations of popular series like Cowboy Bebop and One Piece.
At the same time, we’ve seen more and more American creators build their fannish enthusiasm for manga and anime into businesses: Valkyrae recently launched her own anime-focused production company, Hihi Studios; and Tony Weaver Jr. and Brandon Chen founded manga production studios Weird Enough Productions and Inspired Productions, respectively.
Williams’ move into manga-making is right in line with other creator businesses. We’ve seen countless culinary creators come out with their own food & bev products, gaming creators open studios or code their own games, and much, much more. This is another area to watch as creators continue turning their passions into their careers.
