South Korea's booming 'webtoons'

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/05/business/tech/south-koreas-booming-webtoons-put-japans-print-manga-notice/

by oska • 7 years ago

183 115 7 years ago

japantimes.co.jp

cjsawyer• 7 years ago

“Internet threatens print industry” would’ve been a less interesting headline.

novok• 7 years ago

The ideas in Reinventing Comics are finally becoming mainstream.

nyxxie2• 7 years ago

Another day another story of an old style of business facing obsolescence due to shifting market conditions.

The narrative for stories like this one is usually “businesses stuck in their ways refuse to adapt and die out”, painting the business as fools who die due to their incompetence and conservative mindset. I’m curious, though; is there any reason why Japan’s manga publishers might want to retain their focus on print media rather than move to a digital focus?

Going digital seems like the clear optimal move here, they might even consider encouraging artists to create their own webtoons and make Japan competitive in that space. Why might they not want to do so?

hkmurakami2• 7 years ago

Web manga exists already as both redistribution and early talent development. What they are really lacking in is an eye towards global distribution.

One reason for fixating on print is the existing strong relationships the publishers have with both the physical book stores and the printing houses in Tokyo. Culturally hard to blow up those decades old relationships. It’s how it is.

jniedrauer• 7 years ago

an old style of business facing obsolescence

Manga is nowhere near obsolete. It's such a huge market that there are entire supporting industries indirectly built around it.

Why might they not want to do so?

Probably because they're raking in money.

nyxxie2• 7 years ago

Manga is nowhere near obsolete

I agree. The obsolete label applies to print manga, not the medium itself.

oska• 7 years ago

The question of why Japanese publishers are reluctant to move to the simpler format is addressed towards the end of the article and some good points are made.

hkmurakami2• 7 years ago

At the end of the day great content wins though. The medium’s convenience really only makes a difference in the “filler” level content we consume.

For the winners of the power law in manga we’ll go wherever the great content happens to be. (That being said japan is so bad at modern global digital licensing / distribution they really have been leaving tons of money on the table for the last decade+)

daxterspeed• 7 years ago

It's honestly quite depressing to imagine just how much money is left on the table regarding manga. The demand for translations has lead to massive amounts of illegal sharing of digital/digitalized copies and there's even somewhat of a living to be made of unofficial translations (though I know many translate out of self interest).

I'm hoping that there'll eventually be a Steam for manga. I know several companies are trying to become that, but they've all failed to catch on with both consumers and producers.

Retric• 7 years ago

US pricing is silly. But, the US market for this stiff is also fairly tiny. Outside of a small number of mega hits it’s just not worth the company’s time to try and sell to the US market.

Some of this just comes down to cultural differences. Most US novels don’t get translated to Japanese.

screye• 7 years ago

Shueisha, (the biggest publisher and the one who runs Shounen Jump) has recently become a bit proactive. They released an app named Manga Plus that has most of their popular stuff for free.

It is relatively well designed app and releases come out inside of a week, after their release in Japan.

I still haven't gotten around to using it on a regular basis, but that's because I don't read manga on my phone. But, it is a step in the right direction.

Steam for manga

A pipe dream that I share with you my friend.

Animats• 7 years ago

Japan and South Korea are in a battle over popular culture. Japan has the Cool Japan Fund to invest in pop culture projects.[1] The fund, backed by the Government of Japan and some big banks, was well-financed, but the projects have not been very successful.[2]

They need some better VCs.

[1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [2] https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-co...

0_gravitas• 7 years ago

I mean it seems hard to be very pop-culture when your country is pretty well known for the whole "go with the norms/traditions" stuff,

echelon• 7 years ago

Who will win this battle? What are the ramifications?

intertextuality6• 7 years ago

There's no battle. Both Korea and Japan see the value in exporting cultural products, although I don't think the Korean government is focusing on webtoons as much as kpop.

Manga and webtoons are different and cater to different audiences.

In any case manga is much, much more popular and actually gets translations. I think this is due to the longer publishing schedules and how established manga is compared to webtoons.

cirno94• 7 years ago

Korean music is more popular in foreign countries than Japanese music, and their dramas may also be more popular, but manga, anime, light novels and Japanese games are so huge that there's no real competition going on here. I think many people overestimate the importance and popularity of Kpop.

seibelj• 7 years ago

Anecdotal, but my wife is obsessed with webtoons and eagerly awaits new updates to the (50? 100?) different stories she’s following. It’s similar to the way I consume podcasts. She especially likes romance webtoons.

Before finding webtoons she had no interest in graphic novels, comics, anime, etc. and still doesn’t. She just likes her webtoons.

KaoruAoiShiho5• 7 years ago

It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.

Merem3• 7 years ago

Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community.

Really, do you have some numbers? Here in Germany, Shoujo/Shounen Ai are the most popular genres. I would imagine that those are pretty popular in France as well for example.

sk0g2• 7 years ago

Presumably, from the rest of your comment, the perspective of said Twilight game would be of the main female character? Don't remember her name, but most of her screen time is spent merely looking disinterested. Not sure how well that would translate to video game mechanics.

This made me remember how badly I wanted a reverse Zelda game though, where Link gets in trouble and you have to rescue him as Zelda :)

Vomzor• 7 years ago

I think you’re wrong on both counts. I know plenty of female targeted comics in Belgium and France.

And half of gamers are women. Women just like to play different games than men. Casual games that are dismissed as ‘real games’ by many. But even before smartphones casual games were a billion dollar industry.

There’s a study [1] that spells out which game genres are dominated by women. They surveyed 270,000 gamers about their favorite game titles. According to this study, women make up about 70% of match 3 and family/farm simulation games’ audiences. About half of casual puzzle and atmospheric exploration games are played by women, too. The gender ratio plummets when we get to first-person shooters, tactical shooters and racing games. At the bottom of the chart, a mere 2% of sports game-players are women

[1] https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre...

esyir4• 7 years ago

It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.

Man, that's a pretty big reach to go from shoujo manga is unpopular to "the west is suppressing women's media". While growing in popularity for some time, I believe that manga in the US was and still remains a niche market that remains associated (to a greater extent than comics) with low social status groups.

I will say that the American comic scene is pretty inbred though. Yes, there are indie comics, but in the US, the vast majority of comic sales are from two companies marketing their shared universes and associated characters [1]. In comparison, manga tends to have each author put out >=1 distinct series, typically with their own separate worlds. I believe the same applies to the french/belgian comic scene as well.

[1] https://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2018.html

drenvuk• 7 years ago

If I may ask, where does she consume them?

KaoruAoiShiho5• 7 years ago

I wouldn't know specifically about OP but probably one of these: https://www.webtoons.com/en/ https://www.lezhin.com/en

gknoy• 7 years ago

Line Webtoon [0] has a ton that I enjoy reading. It does just about everything perfectly that I have wanted over 20+ years of reading web comics.

I enjoy reading a lot of web comics (Girl Genius, Gunnerkrigg Court, PA, etc), but have _always_ wanted an RSS feed or similar that would make it trivial to read / continue-reading a comic that doesn't update every day. (I very nearly wrote a scraper to scrape some when getting to their archives proved hard, but decided not to.)

The webtoon app remembers which ones you read, which episode you are on, and _where in the episode_ you are. The only down side is that reading progress seems to be saved on the device, so reading on a web browser vs reading on a mobile device. The mobile app will ping me whenever one of the comics I follow has an update. (I dislike that it pings me for random "you might like this comic ..." notifications, but it's I think the only thing I dislike.)

If you like Romance, I recommend "Siren's Lament". If you like post-apocalyptic/horror, HIVE is well done (though I stopped reading it, it was what got me hooked on the platform).

I still periodically open a half dozen browser tabs to check up on the web-only comics I enjoy, but finding/consuming more than a few is a pain in the neck, and I frankly would read them 100% on Webtoons if they were published there.

0: https://www.webtoons.com/en/

0x8BADF00D• 7 years ago

They’re essentially the same thing. I see ads for webtoons but the tropes are the same you see in manga. Very large breasted women who are all attracted to the socially awkward nerdy guy.

yorwba2• 7 years ago

That is probably more indicative of the kind of content that pulls in eyeballs when broadly advertised than the genre as a whole. For example https://www.heartofkeol.com/ probably counts as a "webtoon" and follows a different set of tropes.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

Also a matter of targeting - with fresh accounts browsing certain subsets where I didn't bother to install have clearly gotten work youtube for music loops to think of me as a woman completely accidentally.

I got essentially entirely romance manga banner ads and video ads were for birth control, menstrual products, and oddly schizophrenia medication (not sure if that is broad targetted or not). It makes them look amusingly inept at ad targeting and someone in marketing look kind of sexist - given that guy ads tried to sell me cars and beer constantly.

cirno94• 7 years ago

There's manga about cooking, golf, video games, samurai, World War II, social problems, fantasy, scifi, single parenthood, mountain climbing, volleyball, lesbians, office work... anything you could think of. "Large breasted women attracted to the socially awkward nerdy guy" is just a Western meme.

httpz• 7 years ago

Webtoons have a very interesting business model. Unlike manga, webtoons are usually free and ad supported. I don't even have to sign up to start reading one in most cases. The interesting part is, webtoons are usually released once a week and you can actually pay ~30cents to read the latest episode before it's released next week for free. So if you can't wait another week after a cliff hanger, you can pay to read the next episode and now you're stuck in a vicious cycle of paying every episode to be one episode ahead.

kamfc• 7 years ago

A value meal for 0.30USD, count me in. The concern is how much of it gets to the artist.

techwolf• 7 years ago

Most webcomic artists have been using this model for a while now; no one likes ads and they don't pay much, but $1 a month on Patreon to see pages a week early isn't too much to ask. There are often higher tiers for bonus content (sketches, high-res pages, side comics, etc.) as well.

kevingadd• 7 years ago

One other element to webtoons' success that isn't mentioned in this article: When I see people talking about comics with LGBT themes that aren't from the US, a significant % of them are Korean webtoons on one of the multiple portals that have dozens of active series with those themes in them. This seems like a savvy way to target audiences that are traditionally underserved (i.e. if they want to find this content, japanese or otherwise, it's quite difficult). Some of the portals seem to specialize in this content - Approximately 1/2 of Lezhin's active series appear to be about homosexual romance, for example. For a Japanese consumer a lot of this content is either in 1-3 focused monthly/bimonthly print series or picked up at comics festivals in-person.

I've seen some attempts to target this audience from Chinese artists as well but with the policy changes made by the Chinese government lately I have no idea if those artists will be able to continue with their work - I've seen a few reports from artists that the government is actively punishing them for releasing that kind of content now (hopefully this is not true).

duckonomy2• 7 years ago

Korean here who has been watching webtoons since the very beginning.

Unlike some recent hits made by printed manhwa artists, webtoons were initially an amateur thing. Where as mangas always seemed to have a certain level of professionality in terms of detail and storytelling.

That said, it is interesting how Koreans adapt to these technologies really fast and globalize their culture through a media platform.

It feels really weird when you spot someone reading a webtoon in public in the US because that was just native Koreans who lived in Korea 5 years ago.

sdrothrock• 7 years ago

Since you've been reading webtoons for a long time, I have a question if you have time.

A lot of the most popular webtoons I've read are based on serialized novels (e.g. 귀환자의 마법은 특별해야 합니다) -- I've been wondering if this is an actual link, or just some kind of selection bias. Do you know?

duckonomy2• 7 years ago

I'm not really sure what the "most popular" webtoons among non-Koreans. I know some American friends who showed me some that were supposedly popular, but I couldn't recognize.

That's certainly not a trend in mainstream webtoons, which are usually the Naver Webtoons. Nearly all (can't think of any one based on something) of them on that platform are original content. Sometimes they get published as novels. Like Noblesse.

I think the particular one you mentioned is based on a webnovel (similar to webtoons but novels).

I definitely see this trend in Japanese mangas though.

esyir4• 7 years ago

I'd compare the Korean webtoon scene more to the american webcomic scene than to the professional manga environment. Maybe it also compares well to doujin, though to me it feels like the closest resemblance is webcomics.

kmlx2• 7 years ago

it’s great that this forces more manga to move to the web. where’s my Netflix for manga Japan?

anecdotally, on a JAL flight between Tokyo and London (for which Russia taxes every passenger individually, story for another time), I saw a bunch of manga on the in-flight entertainment system, and people were actually using it to read. cooler still, seeing both the parents and their children reading different manga.

intertextuality6• 7 years ago

If someone did a subscription service for manga with quality translations (and coloring) they'd make a killing, probably.

kmlx2• 7 years ago

the problem is the medium: manga are just not made for digital consumption. they’re brilliant for analog thou.

i’ve tried a couple of these services, but they were quite subpar.

jpatokal2• 7 years ago

One factor not discussed in the article is the differing attitude towards exports, piracy and copy protection. Historically, and even today, it's extremely difficult to legally view lots of Japanese content outside Japan, yet Japanese producers pursue copyright claims with rabid fervor. Japanese publishers for books and music were also extremely resistant to move to e-books, digital downloads or streaming.

For whatever reason, South Korean publishers were not as myopic, meaning their content could be more easily accessed -- at first technically illegally, but soon there was a groundswell of demand that led to large-scale legal rebroadcasting (TV stations showing Korean dramas etc) and that then led to today's juggernaut. Manga is just the latest example of Japan losing a market that really should have been theirs for the taking.

noobermin• 7 years ago

At the risk of sounding somewhat like I'm stereotyping, why is this? I never associated this with Japan in particular, but between losing out of loads of Japanese music I followed a few years ago and Nintendo basically invalidating everyone's Wii purchases it feels like it is ingrained in the corporate culture over there particularly for the large publishers.

Not that we have our own blemishes, DMCA, disregard for things like fair-use, parody and so on, etc. Heh, now that I think of it we have our own issues too.

adventured• 7 years ago

I'd be very surprised if South Korea doesn't still view itself as an underdog, both economically and culturally. They were very poor until the early 1990s. As recently as the mid 1970s, they were still third world poor.

Japan was a mighty empire not so long ago, and then quickly rose again after the 1950s to have one of the most potent economies. In the late 1980s while Japan was viewed as taking over the world economically, South Korea was just beginning to stir (Japan's economic output per capita was about 6x that of South Korea in the late 1980s). All the way back to the early 1960s, Japan had 5x to 6x the output per capita of South Korea.

I think a country that perceives itself as an underdog always behaves very different from a country that regards being on top as their natural right (which was certainly Japan's attitude during their economic ascension decades). South Korea will surpass Japan's per capita economic output in the next dozen years, for the first time in over a century. It'll be quite the accomplishment.

mikekchar• 7 years ago

Manga publishers and Japanese music publishers (uh... essentially Sony) are actually very different. To be fair, quite a long time ago manga publishers were actually incredibly lenient/naive about managing their copyright. I'm not sure I should admit this publicly, but I used to do translation for a scanlation group (we only did things that were out of print even in Japan... taking the moral, if not legal high road ;-) ). Publishers at that time generally left you alone and didn't really care about scanlators because they thought that there wasn't a market in the west.

This probably sounds unbelievable, but I actually talked my group into seeing if we could license the manga we were scanlating. I figured that since it was all obscure stuff (even in Japan) it wouldn't cost that much. So we contacted them and they were very interested. They sent us over a price sheet for various manga and I couldn't believe the cost. They were charging about $1000 per volume with no royalties! And that was for current stuff (at the time -- round about 2000).

You may have heard of Viz (publisher of translated manga). I can't remember exactly, but I believe even Inu Yasha was priced around that point (and I couldn't believe that Viz didn't have an exclusive deal). But basically, all at once I realised that Viz was built by essentially getting all the manga for free and publishing it!

Around about 2005, the manga publishers started to realise that they were being insane. Especially for manga that made it to anime, they began to aggressively get exclusive deals for the translation rights. Then they started to send out notices to groups (mostly fansubs, but I heard some scanlation groups got letters) to ask them to stop.

As for our group, we couldn't convince them to go to a digital platform. They were still really wary about it and didn't understand the technology. We didn't want to go to print because... Ummm... we had no money and were only doing it for fun. So we let it slide. They never contacted us again although they clearly new we were violating their copyright. They just didn't care, I think.

In my mind, anyway, that's how the manga/anime scene was built in the west originally anyway. It was powered by scanlation groups and fansubs. It was already super popular by the time the publishers realised that they had a market in the west -- and then they cashed in.

It's hard to say what Japanese publishers should do. I agree that they should have moved to digital a lot earlier. However, even saying that, we scanlated a web manga from an author we liked. It was incredibly unknown in Japan even though the author had a successful anime. Nobody in Japan was interested in a free web comic at the time. Bizarre, but true.

As for South Korea, I think they realise that they have to do things differently in order to break into the market. However, I'll predict that the situation will repeat itself. As soon as they have the kind of market share they want, they will start to close the doors. It's just the way these business guys think.

esyir4• 7 years ago

Probably changed by this point in time. Most manga can be found available online in digital format now. Admittedly, I'm a dead-tree loyalist here.

Macha• 7 years ago

This probably sounds unbelievable, but I actually talked my group into seeing if we could license the manga we were scanlating. I figured that since it was all obscure stuff (even in Japan) it wouldn't cost that much. So we contacted them and they were very interested. They sent us over a price sheet for various manga and I couldn't believe the cost. They were charging about $1000 per volume with no royalties! And that was for current stuff (at the time -- round about 2000).

This is basically how Crunchyroll got started. They only removed the pirated content after they got the Naruto license.

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-11-17/tv-tokyo-to...

reaperducer• 7 years ago

I don't think it's fair to call it myopic. That implies that one method is correct and the other is wrong. It's more of a cultural difference.

While South Korea has largely embraced the Western style of instant gratification hyper consumerism, Japan is more nuanced. And IMO, that's a good thing.

There is value in scarcity, and in context. It's OK if a publisher doesn't want its work distributed around the world for everyone to see. It's that publisher's property. Having to travel to Japan to see, read, or hear certain things is a good thing. If every thing and every experience was available everywhere, there would be no point in travel.

Having ramen in a hole-in-the-wall ramen shop beneath the train tracks in Japan is a different experience than having ramen in Japantown Los Angeles.

When my wife goes to Japan, she brings an small empty suitcase to ship home just for the books, magazines, and music she can't get here.

It's like artists who destroy their work after a show. Scarcity increases the object's value to some. And it's the artist's choice to do so, not the audience's.

I know this is an unpopular view, especially in tech circles, but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

YeGoblynQueenne5• 7 years ago

To be more precise, you may not have the right but you do have the opportunity, when it comes to manga and anime. I don't know how feriociously japanese publishers pursue copyright offenders overseas but there certainly is a great number of unofficial translations online most of which seem to be made by people in the US and Europe.

Of course, the translations (and the scans) are often a bit crap. But you can still get an idea of the original's quality.

Quarrelsome2• 7 years ago

but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

Oh you do. Artists and general creatives often tumble into the trap of thinking they can control the spread of their work following public release. You cannot control the zeitgeist of a generation. If your work is popular than the moment you print it, its spread is out of your hands. IP, copyright and legal action are lossy mechanisms that work against the prevailing system. I'm not saying they don't have value (they very much do!) but when your product is consumer-grade content that don't have infrastructure you own baked into its operation you'll find your stuff being obtained illegally if you don't make it available legally and quickly.

I've seen break-dancers expect to be able to have exclusive rights to movement into perpetuity enforced by community-driven shaming tactics (doesn't work) and I've read enough scanlations to know that the Japanese approach to print manga is negligent of the ramifications of globalisation. When you publish, its gone. You have to be more prepared at publish time in the modern era.

cblades2• 7 years ago

There is value in scarcity

I'd argue that for easily digitized works, there's no such thing as scarcity.

Certainly publishers have the right to sue and limit legal distribution, but it does seem at least naive for them to believe they can control illegal distribution. Perhaps that's not the rationale; maybe it's a purely principled stance.

Nevertheless, their work will be spread digitally, and it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face to not have some legal form of distribution that the publisher can make money from.

klibertp2• 7 years ago

It's OK if a publisher doesn't want its work distributed around the world for everyone to see.
And it's the artist's choice to do so, not the audience's.

There's a (not) very subtle contradiction in these two sentences.

In short: yay for authors' rights, forever and ever! but I probably couldn't care less about the leeches^W publishers.

The faster the publishing industry - perpetually stuck in the 15th century and trying way too hard to bring us all back to that time - is brought down in flames and replaced the better.

pattisapu• 7 years ago

Speaking of scarcity, valuing it, and protecting it, it seems that physical media, like CDs for music are, or were, more popular in Japan than other places [1].

Is the situation in South Korea similar or different? I don't know enough about either; just thinking out loud.

[1] http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/japan-cd-sales/

plorkyeran• 7 years ago

The end result of refusing to provide your manga in digital form is not that people only consume it in the form you intended. Somewhat the opposite, in fact. Instead you simply have people scanning everything that gets published and distributing it for you, with you having zero say in the resulting quality.

For niche self-published works sold at conventions the number of illegal downloads is often dramatically higher than the total number of physical copies that exist, and the people who experience your art in its intended form are a minority.

deogeo• 7 years ago

you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

According to the first sale doctrine, you do. If someone buys media in Japan, then brings them back to the US (i.e. imports them), and sells them, that's entirely legal, and there's nothing the copyright owner can do about it.

And looking beyond what the law currently is, to perhaps what it should be, copyright should remunerate creators for copies of their works, not allow them to impose censorship, which is exactly what limiting distribution this way is.

FreeFull• 7 years ago

Nowadays, the manga publisher Shuiesha (known for the Weekly Shōnen Jump) has an official website where can view the last few chapters of each of their manga, translated into English.

cirno94• 7 years ago

Manga is very widespread in the West, so much so that it seems to even eclipse Western comics. It has a big piracy scene that the industry doesn't seem to be doing much to resist. Anime has been exported for as long as it's been around, a major anime boom started in the US in the late 90s, and now you can legally stream practically every anime series at the same time as it's airing in Japan (or after it's finished if it's on Netflix). Anime streaming grew out of pirate streaming until Crunchyroll went legit, and even before that there were tons of series released on DVD and fansubbed on the internet. Practically nothing is or has been done about piracy. Foreign revenue for the anime industry has been growing by leaps and bounds and has never been higher. (https://aja.gr.jp/english/japan-anime-data)

So it's not true that Japanese media is poorly distributed outside Japan, that copyright enforcement is too strict, and that Korea has been eating Japan's lunch. Very few people even know about webtoons compared to manga; r/webtoons has 2K subscribers, r/manhwa has 5.5K, while r/manga and r/anime both have a million. Korea's animation industry is practically non-existent compared to Japan's, and their game industry isn't much better. Kpop is more internationally successful than Jpop, but that's also because Jpop just doesn't appeal to Westerners. I believe Kdramas were at some point more successful and widespread in the West, but I'm not sure what the situation is today. There are now many Jdramas on Crunchyroll and Netflix.

I'd take anything the Western media says about Japan with a big pile of salt, because they've long been pushing various doom-and-gloom narratives about a struggling Japan. Chinese animation was supposed to have upstaged the anime industry by now, according to the media.

philliphaydon• 7 years ago

Japan still uses tape to go from agency to broadcaster (this has only started to change over the last couple of years) and a lot of it is to do with not wanting to put people out of work and less about adopting technology. The way business works in japan is just so different to anywhere else in the world.

kochikame• 7 years ago

Japanese people are reading ad-supported free manga on their phones and tablets constantly nowadays.

There are several competing services and they seem to be spending a lot on advertising right now if the amount of TV commercials is anything to go by

leggomylibro• 7 years ago

Web comics were pretty big in the West for a while, too - I guess they never really got large enough to be commercialized and produced on an industrial scale, though.

The article mentions that a lot of these webtoons are vertically-oriented for smartphones; is that what sets them apart? Or is it more of a genre thing? Did they maybe crank up the production values a bit?

https://xkcd.com/157/

intertextuality6• 7 years ago

It may be a little bit of A, a little bit of B.

Anecdotally I can tell you I've seen many, many people reading webtoons on their phones on the subway. I've done it. The vertical format in this case is perfect.

thedaemon• 7 years ago

Definitely the vertical oriented for smart phones. You cannot view them in a page layout. Makes me kind of sad because I don't look at content on my small smartphone, instead I use a large LCD monitor or a large tablet. These webtoons are annoying to try to read on them. :( Makes me sad that I won't be able to read any because of the annoying interface.

rb808• 7 years ago

Can someone please link to a webtoon so I can figure out wtf they're talking about?

I feel old.

intertextuality6• 7 years ago

I mean, "webtoons" aren't really a thing in western culture. You can think of the posts like chapters from a comic. Anyway, here's the latest chapter[0] of 마음의 소리 (The Sound of Your Heart) which is popular. Enough to have its own tv show on netflix.

You can see more of them at comic.naver.com [1]

[0] https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=...

[1] https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn

philshem• 7 years ago

I really enjoyed the first season of The Sound of Your Heart.

darkmarmot• 7 years ago

I read 'Tower of God', it's basically a Shonen like Naruto. (google as I can't link it here- though naver has a public open version somewhere)

doikor• 7 years ago

Tower of god is available on webtoons.com which is the western site of naver (as in they own it and most of their popular stuff ends up there). It also has a quite good app as others have pointed out.

The site also has stuff made by western artist these days.

yongjik2• 7 years ago

If you like really, really dark SF, I would recommend Denma, but for some inexplicable reason they seem to have rearranged the panels in some dummy's-mobile-friendly format. What a sacrilege.

https://www.webtoons.com/en/sf/denma/1-a-dog-of-panama-1/vie...

The original format actually looks like this:

https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=119874&no...

Disclaimer: the author is infamous for never being on time, and it's not complete yet.

ywain• 7 years ago

Holy cow. I've been reading Denma on webtoons.com for over a year now, I had no idea they changed the format. The original looks so much better.

olingern• 7 years ago

I live Japan and this is a great example of how the culture holds on to tradition even if it hurts them over time. Manga is interesting because it’s actually a quite old art form, but the current print method of publication is not [1]. So, you’d expect the web to be a natural, obvious progression.

I’d liken the ethos here to: “Move slow and never break things.”

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga

yongjik2• 7 years ago

Most webtoons trending on domestic manga apps are not only translated but meticulously localized for a Japanese audience, with names, locations and various proper nouns all Japanized. Even the original illustrations can be altered to erase anything distinctly South Korean, such as the design of the police cars.

Man, how the table has turned. This was exactly how South Korea imported Japanese manga and anime for decades. Up until mid-90s virtually all Japanese manga was "Koreanized" in a similar way, even though by that time everybody knew they were Japanese. In earlier days they wouldn't even tell us: there are a generation or two of Korean boys who grew up thinking Atom, Mazinga and Future Boy Conan were Korean animations.

The wounds of colonization (1910-1945) were still raw, and admitting you liked Japanese culture was frowned upon for a very long time. (Which is ironic, considering most of children's prime time TV shows were made in Japan.)

South Korea briefly had a renaissance of comics ("manhwa") in the 90s, but then widespread piracy together with the advent of the internet killed off the industry in the early 2000s. I remember a comic strip where the protagonist (the artist himself) decides to kill himself after going broke, so he turns on the gas valve and go to sleep. He wakes up the next day because the gas line was shut off for non-payment.

I think a major reason why Korea embraced webtoon so easily is that the traditional comics industry was essentially burned to ground. Webtoons were initially a side dish, offered by web portals (which are still strong in Korea) to lure viewers because servers were cheap and artists were also cheap (where else would they go, anyway?). (It also explains why it's basically free and ad-supported.) But then it started to make money, and then money started to attract talents, and so on.

If someone told me, only five years ago, that Korean webtoons will threaten Japanese manga industry, I would've laughed. "What are you talking about? It's Japan!"

m3kw9• 7 years ago

On notice like scoring a point when you are down 10-0

FrozenVoid• 7 years ago

There are some programs that colorize manga(e.g. neural networks), if it was more popular it would add a competitive advantage vs webtoons - artists can tune automatic colorization themselves(vs drawing color). Reading monochrome black drawings is very confined expirience, such colors are depressive, dramatic and bleak - colors that evoke negative associations and melancholy. Color expands the emotional gamut significantly.

Noos• 7 years ago

Eh, they'll die off. Tokypop used to try and license Korean manhwa here a while back ago, among other publishers. If you remember the movie the Priest, that was about as famous as it got here. I used to read it, usually it was the same problem a lot of Korean stuff has..it's an okay copy, but there isn't really an original spark to it that makes it come alive like manga does.

sercand• 7 years ago

I have paid to webtoons for fast-pass several times but not for manga from Japan. One of the reason is official translations come later than the fan translated versions. After a couple of days, there is no remaining discussion of the chapter at the community.

Also, the community is ready to pay for the new manga chapters. Last month, a fan translation group removed their translation of a webtoon, which was in the fast-pass period, because of backlash by the community.

I wish manga is more accessible. Because they are professionally crafted and have better storytelling.

YeGoblynQueenne5• 7 years ago

Interesting to see the picture on the top of the article, meant to represent Japanese print manga, features Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) most prominently.

I don't think I've read any True Beauty, but then again, the fact that I'm not at all sure whether I have, whereas there is no chance of a snowball in hell that I'd confuse Shingeki No Kyojin for anything else, suggests to me that Japanese print manga still have a future. To say the least.

And can I take this opportunity to point people to Totsukuni no Shoujo (The Girl from the Other Side)?

https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo

Once in a while, I find a little gem like that buried under all the shonen and shoujo in my local bookstore. That's what keeps me coming back for more.

Quarrelsome2• 7 years ago

worth noting One Punch Man started out in a web toonish delivery mechanism before being turned into manga.

ksec• 7 years ago

Warning: May be inappropriate comments ahead.

I stumbled upon the topic many years ago when I was looking at online publishing and making money. And Webtoons in South Korea caught my eyes, It was in its early days but I first thought it was some idea that will be destined to fail. Simply because I don't believe there is a market that are willing to pay for it, the content were; Amateur at best. And it was too easy to private. I was wrong. I knew I was wrong because it is gaining momentum not only in Japan, but also across in SEA.

There are two distinct category that Web Toons, and specially South Korea Webtoons excel in. LGBT and Adult Content.

In LGBT I have no idea the audience were huge, with distribution channel like the web, even a small percentage would be a massive Number. And it was amazing to see lots of female secretly fantasise about Gay Man. And unlike man where many are privating porn, they are very much willing to pay for it.

Then there is Hentai, ( the world actually means something else in Japanese but its English form is mostly used to describe Porn in Cartoons or 2D ). I mean, who enjoys it? And even if they did, who is wiling to paid for it? Again turns out the audience is actually gigantic. Pornhub even confirmed this when they release their data analysis.

One day I chatted with an old friends, he is a real life translator who used to do subtitle for Anime as hobby and ask him what is he up to. Turns out he was doing these Webtoons translation from Korean and was making good money. Good not in terms of amount, but in terms of time spent vs money made. As it was much easier to do compared to Animation.

cirno94• 7 years ago

Commercial and independent gay and lesbian manga have existed for 40-50 years, and there's also a significant number of gay/lesbian anime and games.

syntaxing• 7 years ago

I'm a pretty huge reader of manga and I have been reading a couple of webtoons lately. Besides South Korean ones, there are couple of Chinese Webtoons that is based off of famous web novels that is really fun to read. South Korean webtoons tend to have "weird" formatting since its one long page rather like a book since its catered towards phones or tablets. I noticed a good amount of webtoons out of South Korea that is sponsored by Line originally but the industry has really taken off this past couple years with independent publishers. Not sure if this is true since I only see the English translated ones rather than the originals but I find that South Korean webtoons has a higher percentage of being explicit material. Not sure if it's because translators chose them on purpose since they have a higher click rate?

South Korea's booming 'webtoons'

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