Meet the Kansas City creator behind a new popular romantic anime
Anime has had quite the rise in the United States over the past few years. What once felt like something people would side-eye you for watching is now plastered around pop culture, from athletes talking about their love for “Hunter x Hunter” to adaptations of “Demon Slayer” topping the box office charts.
Anime is the term used in Japan to describe all forms of animated material, but around the world, it’s used to describe Japanese animated films and television shows. The shows you see on streaming services and late Saturday night on Cartoon Network adapt the source material from the manga, the Japanese version of a comic book or graphic novel.
Lately, there’s been an uptick of popular webcomics being turned into anime.
Such is the case with “Let’s Play,” a romantic-comedy webcomic that started in 2016 and has since had over 7 million readers worldwide on multiple platforms. The comic was adapted into a television series that just made its debut on anime streaming service Crunchyroll on Oct. 2, and the comic will publish new chapters on webcomic website Tapas after season one of the anime concludes in late December.
Would you believe that it started in Kansas City?
The story follows Samara “Sam” Young, a web developer in Los Angeles who’s also an independent video game creator. Her newest game is received well until a popular streamer trashes the game. Young’s misery continues when she learns the streamer is her new neighbor.
Author and creator Leeanne M. Krecic has called Kansas City home since 2000. She was born in Iowa and grew up in Macon, Missouri, 2 1/2 hours east of Kansas City. She moved to Kansas City to attend the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, but health issues forced her to put down the tuba and take her studies in a different direction.
She earned a degree in computer science and later served as the head of IT for an internet-based company. Around this time, she was also creating fan art centered on anime like “Naruto.” After praising her work, people started to ask her why she wasn’t creating her own story with her art.
At 36 years old, she then paid off all her student loans and other debt and took a chance on herself. She gave herself a year to start making a comic to see if this was a viable path. Not long after that, her “Let’s Play” creation topped the reader charts on its former reading service, Webtoon.
“For so many decades, comics have been very focused to a male audience, and I think that the industry is starting to learn this just absolutely amazing untapped resource, which is the romance female readers,” Krecic said.
She’s since earned awards and recognition for her work, including a 2023 Ringo Award for Fan Favorite Hero, Ringo Award nominations for best cartoonist in 2021 and best webcomic in 2022, and an Eisner Award nomination for best webcomic in 2019.
Crunchyroll then came calling, where it took a few years of collaboration between the streaming service and Krecic before they came to terms on the production.
The streaming service introduced it to production company Slow Curve and television network Fuji TV, who eventually took it to animation studio OLM, who are the same people behind the current iteration of the “Pokémon” anime.
When Krecic met with the studio, they told her one side of the floor is the team working on “Pokémon,” and the other side is the team working on “Let’s Play,” which floored her.
“I was trying to make a comic that people can enjoy and have a little escapism from time to time,” Krecic said. “Then to actually have an anime was never in my wildest dreams.”
What is ‘Let’s Play’?
Krecic’s story “Let’s Play” isn’t a biopic about her life, but it does pull from some of her inspirations and life experiences.
Krecic first played video games when she was 4 years old learning how to read and write on text-based games on the Commodore 64 console. Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis followed before securing a PC built for gaming, and she’s never looked back.
On top of her gaming credentials, her background in computer science and work in IT means she knows what it’s like to be a woman working in a field primarily occupied by men. Both of these aspects are touched on in the story of “Let’s Play.”
“I know and understand fully women working in a STEM field, very highly experienced in that,” she said. “I played tuba, and then I went into IT. I’ve never had a ‘woman’s job’ in my life.”
“Sam” Young isn’t a self-insert character of Krecic, but she said some of the characters represent her emotions, like her femininity, anxiety and skepticism. If a reader doesn’t like a certain character, Krecic is fine with that because odds are she doesn’t like that part of herself either.
She also pays homage to some of the video games she grew up playing in the series, like King’s Quest and World of Warcraft.
The idea for the comic came from some of the “let’s play” video game streamers she watched, like Game Grumps and Markiplier, the latter of which commissioned artwork from her. The streamers will play video games on livestreaming platforms like Twitch or YouTube, and chat with their audience watching around the world.
On one stream she watched, the gamer played a fan-made game and ended up quitting because of how poorly made it was. She remembered watching that video and thinking “what if the streamer met the developer at a convention?” and wondering what that interaction would look like.
The rom-com explores themes of mental health awareness, work-life balance, finding oneself and following your dreams, and you see it play out in each episode through Young’s interactions with her friends, co-workers and neighbors.
“I think people have really enjoyed the series, and they feel like you connect to it in a lot of ways, like they see a lot of themselves in the characters,” she said. “People just like to read a funny story, and they like to read a story of connection.”
Support from her family and fans
The comic version of “Let’s Play” was put on ice for three years as Krecic switched publishing platforms. A hiatus that long would sink most creator’s popularities and reader interest in seeing what’s next in the story, but longtime fans waited patiently for the return, and a new generation is getting their eyes on it, thanks to the anime.
She’s kept fans updated throughout the years on subscription service Patreon, fundraising to send out print editions of her comic and even working on a single-player video game featuring characters from the webcomic called “Everdate.”
Her family’s proud to see her success, too. A bunch of Midwesterners couldn’t have expected this to happen, but writing does run in the family. Krecic’s sister is also an award-winning published author.
“I have cousins who are like, ‘Can I put a banner on my Facebook that promotes it?’” Krecic said. “They’re proud of me, and I’m grateful for that.”
A lot of people she meets at conventions have said to her that they remember reading it in middle school — which isn’t what she wants to hear since it’s designed for ages 14 and up. She’s happy they can read it guilt-free now that they’re older.
Fans of the series are always surprised when they meet her in person, too. Webtoon is a Korean-based company, so they expect to see a Korean creator. When she appears at conventions, like Planet Anime Kansas City, fans are even more surprised, wondering why she’s in “the middle of nowhere.”
Little do they know, she’s in her backyard, happy to call Kansas City home with her husband, their two dogs, two cats, more than 100 fish and ready to add to the story of “Let’s Play” to its new online home.
“I have traveled all over this country for cons and business and everything, and I am always relieved to come back to Kansas City because it’s just, to me, a safe haven,” Krecic said.
This story was originally published November 19, 2025 at 3:58 PM.
