He returned to creative writing again in the early 2010s, serializing his novel Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince: a Gay Superhero Teen Romance online.

It tells the story about a young gay man coming of age in Alabama, and was quickly considered a cult classic of LGBT fiction.

In 2000, Manley moved to San Francisco, where he worked for Streaming Media and served as the first webmaster for Free Speech TV.

Manley soon began recruiting artists for a for-profit, subscription-based webcomics collective, which he launched in March 2002 as Modern Tales.

[3] At the time, Manley hoped the subscription model would increase the visibility of everyone involved in the project, even if each webcomic would have only drawn a niche interest individually.

[5] All his webcomic sites were together referred to as the "Modern Tales family" of websites, and they had featured artists such as Gene Luen Yang, Howard Cruse, Chris Onstad, Shaenon Garrity, and Dylan Meconis.

[5] In collaboration with OnlineComics.net-creator Josh Roberts, Manley started developing a comics-oriented social media and publishing platform titled ComicSpace in 2007.

ComicSpace received funding from Michael Angst and Alan Gershenfeld, who set up a new early-stage venture capital firm named E-Line Media.

[7] Despite this, the Modern Tales-family of websites went relatively quiet in the second half of the 2000s, and Manley began relaunching his subscription services within ComicSpace in 2009, starting with Girlamatic.

[3] While still working on ComicSpace, Manley moved back to Louisville once again and began focusing on personal creative output through an online fiction workshop with a close circle of writers.

Manley stated that he went with subscription models for his early projects because online advertising rates were low and bandwidth was very expensive at the time.