College romances, historical battles at sea, students with superpowers, vampires, secret agents, the lives of convenience store workers: People enjoy all these and more. From the sweet to the satirical, the mundane to the fantastical, one in three Koreans reads webtoons, whether at home or during commutes and coffee breaks.

Visually and thematically rich comic strips wholly created for and adapted to the Internet, webtoons are the latest generation of a beloved art form, and one whose innovations all come straight from Korea.

The comic strip began in 19th-century Europe, found its form in early 20th century U.S., and realized new storytelling possibilities in mid- to late 20th century Japan. Now, Korean artists and writers have pioneered a thoroughly 21st-century form that embraces the potential of digital art and information technology to take the comic strip, both the creation process and the reading experience, to a whole new level.



Webtoons, the most popular of which have gone on to become major television dramas, stage productions and motion pictures, have proven themselves in Korea not just by winning large readerships, but by making the leap into more established art forms. Now they face their next challenge: Can they succeed in the global market?

Most countries have produced writers and artists who create comics for the Internet, as well as readers who enjoy them, but in Korea webtoons are a national cultural and economic phenomenon. One reason is a well-developed IT industry that has given rise to a variety of platforms that facilitate the creation, consumption and distribution of digital content. Other countries’ Web-based comics, which don’t benefit from a comparable infrastructure, haven’t received the same amount of domestic attention that, in Korea, has made webtoons into multiple media–spanning cultural properties, and thus potential objects of international interest as well.

Purpose-built for the Internet Age

Back in the 1990s, well before the coinage of the term “webtoon,” Korean comic artists began publishing on the Web: Well known newspaper cartoonists such as the Chosun Ilbo’s Pak Kwang-su got their start in part because readers used email to share their work. In the early 2000s, Korea’s first generation of webtoon artists, which included Shim Seung-hyun (“Papepopo Memories”), Kwon Yoon-ju (“Snowcat”) and Jeong Chul-Yeon (“Marine Blues”), gained a new distribution channel with the advent of Lycos Korea and Yahoo Korea. Then the big homegrown Internet portal companies, Daum and Naver, created specialized portals for comics. Daum did it in 2003, Naver did it the next year, and smaller players followed with Internet comic services of their own.

In just a few years, access barriers would vanish with the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets, which have since made it possible for 80 percent of the Korean population to read webtoons anywhere, at any time. As the smartphone rose, so did the term “webtoon,” coined to draw a distinction between comics created for conventional print media and those made expressly for consumption online.

Non-traditional content finds its place

As the concept of webtoons entered the consciousness of the reading public, the portals developed their own systems to incubate new talent. The artists and writers interested in exploring subjects that wouldn’t have found a place in Korea’s traditional comics industry, hollowed out in the late 1990s by the economic ravages of the Asian financial crisis and the strictures of the Juvenile Protection Act, which put an end to the publication of adult comics. The new webtoon landscape offered the freedom to deal with a wider range of themes than ever before, satisfying readers’ desire for deep emotions, complex psychological dimensions, social criticism, and even realistic details of everyday life.

Whereas in the United States, creating comics for the Web is a hobby with a very low probability of becoming a job, the presence in Korea of portals like Naver, which began commissioning artists for its dedicated webtoon section in 2005, quickly professionalized the industry. This in turn gave incentives to more ambitious, thoughtful and elaborate projects.

At least 120,000 aspiring comic artists have sent their work out into the world through Korean portals, whose numbers have multiplied and whose operators now include mobile providers like SK Telecom and KT. About 500 artists have created series that not only continue to this day, publishing once or twice per week, but have done so for more than 300 episodes. This has created a robust domestic webtoon market, the estimated value of which the KT Economic Research Institute placed at KRW 420 billion won in 2015 and projected to reach KRW 880 billion by 2018. It is not just premium portal memberships that create value, but also sales of merchandise and adaptation rights, increasingly in countries outside Korea. The webtoons with the highest profile in this market tend to come out of the three big portals: Naver, Daum, and the more recently established Lezhin Comics.



Wiredness meets creativity

The factors that make this possible converge, to a unique degree, in Korea. The country’s sheer “wiredness,” much publicized in the international media, has created an efficient information technology infrastructure for webtoon readers and creators alike. The resultant abundance of content forces each comic to find and capitalize on its specific niche, a situation that encourages experimentation and innovation of diverse material. Readers can, and do, enjoy the fruits of these labors on their smartphones during moments of free time throughout the day, drawn in by the stories but also by their ability to leave comments and communicate with their fellow fans and even the creators themselves, exchanging opinions, interpretations, and speculation about their favorite series as well as sharing them with friends.

All this technological know-how, however, couldn’t have built the wide world of webtoons by itself. Korea has produced many avid readers, but also a large number of young creators whose artistic skills exceed even their technological savvy.

Throughout the webtoon’s short life so far, they have continually pushed the form forward, incorporating each new aspect of the technology into the very composition and structure of their work. This began when single Web pages and their theoretically infinite length freed them from restrictions of one paper page at a time, turning the reading experience into one better resembling that for long, unbroken scrolls. Artists have used this advantage to create impressive aesthetics and dramatic ends.

Creators went on to develop other techniques to heighten the sensory experience for their readers. Choi Jong-ho, better known by his pen name of Horang, used darkening backgrounds and animated apparitions to heighten the horror of comics like “Ok-Su Station Ghost” and “Ghost in Masung Tunnel.” The newest webtoons make use of a host of effects impossible on paper, such as voices and other sounds, animation, and even three dimensional imagery and kinetic effects using the smartphone’s vibration function.

Online and silver screen success

Kang Do-young, perhaps the most famous webtoon creator of them all, goes by the pen name Kang Full. Without any formal education in comics, Kang became one of the first generation of Korean Internet based comic artists in 2002 when he began publishing his work on his personal website. His first long-form series, “Love Story,” drew a record 2 million hits in one day and provided the source material for the 2008 feature film “Hello, Schoolgirl.” Since then, film industry interest hasn’t let up. Other pictures based on Kang’s webtoons include 2011’s “Pained,” 2012’s “The Neighbor,” “26 Years,” and most recently the animated Korean-Japanese co-production “Timing.”

Yoon Tae-ho, another of the webtoon movement’s leading lights, brought the form a burst of attention in 2012 with “Misaeng” or “Incomplete Life,” which also shed light on the societal problems inherent in the precarious internship existence. Yoon rendered the problem realistically in comic form, and it was all too recognizable to the underemployed and directionless masses of Korea’s younger generation. With 600 million hits online, the series became a television drama in 2014, in turn making the comic series into an even bigger hit. The protagonist’s name even became a nickname for legislation to help irregular workers.

Around that same time, “Secretly, Greatly,” the film adaptation of the artist Hun’s series “Covertness,” about the lives of young North Korean spies in a small South Korean town, drew 7 million viewers and set several box-office records: the highest single-day opening for a domestic film, the most tickets sold in one day for a domestic film, the biggest opening weekend, and the highest-grossing webtoon-based film.

The list of webtoons adapted into movies and dramas goes on: “Moss,” by Yoon Tae-ho, a psychological thriller set in the rural countryside; Yoon’s “Inside Men,” which addresses political corruption in Korea; Kang Full’s “Love Story,” about a romance between a high school girl and an awkward office worker; “Shut Up Flower Boy Band,” Choi Yeji’s series following the exploits of a fictional K-pop band; romantic comedies like Soonkki’s “Cheese in the Trap,” Chun Kye-young’s “Pretty Boy,” and Yoo Hyun-sook’s “Peep at Him Every Day,”; stories rooted in more somber emotions like Ryu Che-rin’s “We Broke Up” and Lee Jong-hoon’s “Cat Funeral”; Seok Woo’s “Orange Marmalade,” which puts a Korean spin on the kind of humanand- vampire love story popularized by “Twilight; Hyde, Jekyll, Me,” Lee Choong-ho’s reinterpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale; Man Chwi’s supernatural story of “The Girl Who Sees Smells”; and Kian84’s high school style and-superficiality satire “Fashion King.”

Those, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency, count for just a few of the more than 70 webtoons for which adaptation rights have already been sold. The success of webtoon-derived content in other media hasn’t happened by accident. The art form now bears the label “one source, multi-use.” This means it was created for one medium, but by design is adaptable for many others. The adaptability of webtoons goes beyond movies and television dramas to encompass video games, design, merchandise – Naver has opened an online shop called Webtoon Studio – and even the musical “Secretly, Greatly” makes its stage debut this year.

International success awaits?

One question above all others looms over the webtoon business: How can all this turn from a national craze into an international one? In many ways, the transformation is already underway. Korean language learners have long relied on webtoons as study material, and some series have even appeared in other languages as illegal fan translations. Not failing to take notice of this demand, domestic websites have established platforms in other countries and partnered with foreign content providers to enable Korean webtoons to reach a global audience.

Naver and Line have begun to offer comics in English and simplified Chinese. Lezhin launched its U.S. operations in 2015 and also publishes on qq.com, China’s most popular Web portal. Spottoon, a collective platform launched by 23 leading webtoon artists and The Hankyoreh newspaper, aims to offer 23 series to audiences worldwide in a variety of languages as well as media such as film, drama and cartoons. And North America now has its very own Korean style webtoon portal in the Silicon Valley based Tapastic, whose investors include Daum Kakao and SK.

Quite a few webtoons have already demonstrated international appeal. Recently, the British production company February Film purchased the rights to Ha Il-kwon’s “Three-Stage Combination Kim Changnam,” the story of a boy and his robot girlfriend in a futuristic dystopia. The Japanese game developer Square Enix holds remake rights for Ju Ho-min’s “With God,” which is set in the afterlife and looks at the challenges faced by the recently deceased. Shooting will begin later this year for a Korean film adaptation. Studio Caramel’s “Dieter,” which follows the travails of an overweight girl fighting to slim down by any means necessary, has a four-country publication contract in Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Webtoons have yet to make serious inroads into foreign markets, however, which represent an enormous opportunity. The Korea Creative Content Agency estimated the value of the global comic book market in 2013 at USD 8.8 billion and the digital comic book market at USD 1 billion. It makes sense that webtoon providers would want to find a way into the U.S. market, given its estimated value of USD 600 million, but even more that they would want to find a way into the USD 3 billion-strong market in Japan, the country that buys the most comics in the world.

Webtoons have generated unprecedented enthusiasm for comics among domestic readers. If this enthusiasm translates into higher regard for comics as an art form as well as entertainment, and if the rest of the world catches up to Korea’s level of connectedness, all the factors will be in place for a globalization of Korean webtoons as well as the Korean webtoon model. When the world inevitably grows tired of American-style superheroes, it will surely welcome all these high-style high schoolers, courageous admirals, besotted vampires, ghosts floating between this world and the next, rock guitarist spies, and disgruntled part-timers. The comic strip’s Korean century has, after all, only just begun.

*Article from Korea Magazine (March 2016)