Webtoon: how Korea reinvented the comic

The thumb slides downward, the screen scrolls, and the story advances by itself: a panel fades, the emptiness stretches to build tension, then the revelation surges up, in full colour, calibrated for the precise instant your finger uncovers it. You do not turn the page: you unroll it. This visual grammar born for the smartphone has a name — the webtoon — and South Korea has made it one of its most powerful export products.

The webtoon is the Korean digital comic, designed for vertical reading on a phone screen. In a few years, this format born at the turn of the 2000s has upended comics worldwide, nourished the giants of the Korean internet and supplied stories to hit series and films. To understand the webtoon is to grasp how a country invented a new way of reading images.

From manhwa to webtoon#

Before the webtoon there was the manhwa, the traditional Korean comic, cousin to the Japanese manga and the Chinese manhua — the three words sharing the same Sino-Japanese root. Printed on paper, read from left to right, manhwa had its own history, its authors, its genres, but remained in the shadow of its powerful Japanese neighbour.

The turning point comes with the rise of the internet in Korea, a country ultra-connected very early. From the start of the 2000s, artists publish their pages directly online, free of charge, on web portals. The word webtoon, a contraction of web and cartoon, first denotes this migration: the Korean comic leaves paper for the screen, and finds there a new freedom.

The webtoon did not digitise the comic: it rethought it for the thumb and the screen, inventing a storytelling that paper could not contain.

A grammar born for the smartphone#

The great break of the webtoon is formal: it is read vertically, by scrolling the screen from top to bottom, not by turning pages. This "infinite strip" changes everything. The artist plays with the length of the scroll as with a rhythm: a long blank builds suspense, a sudden drop triggers the shock, an oversized image stretches under the thumb.

The webtoon is also almost always in colour, where manga remains mostly black and white. Designed for mobile, it favours wide panels, readable on a small screen, and publication in regular episodes, often weekly. This form perfectly espouses contemporary habits: one reads an episode in transit, waits for the next, comments. Reading becomes an appointment.

The empire of platforms#

The webtoon would never have exploded without the platforms that industrialised it. Two Korean giants dominate: Naver, whose service launched in 2004 became Naver Webtoon (known internationally as LINE Webtoon), and Kakao, via KakaoPage and Daum. These portals offer thousands of series and have structured an entire market.

Their business model is ingenious: most episodes are free, funded by advertising, but the impatient reader can pay to unlock chapters in advance — the "wait or pay" formula. Added to this are merchandise, subscriptions and adaptations. This model has allowed amateurs to become paid professional authors, and has made the webtoon a true creative industry, exported afterward to the American, Japanese and European markets.

The breeding ground of K-dramas and cinema#

The webtoon has become a mine of stories for the Korean audiovisual industry, and then the global one. When a series reaches millions of readers online, its adaptation into a drama or film arrives with an audience already won over and a tested plot. The phenomenon has become so widespread that many recent hits are, originally, webtoons.

Examples abound: Itaewon Class, Sweet Home, Tower of God, Solo Leveling (brought to animation) or Lookism are first webtoons turned acclaimed series, streamed on the major platforms. This virtuous circle — hit webtoon, adaptation, renewed interest in the original work — makes the format a pillar of Korean content production, and a weighty argument in the globalisation of hallyu.

Webtoon against manga?#

The webtoon is often compared to manga, but the two do not play the same score. Manga, printed, is read in black and white and from right to left, in a well-established tradition of authors and magazines. The webtoon, for its part, is native to digital, in colour, vertical, designed for mobile from the very first panel. They are not two versions of the same thing, but two cultures of the image.

Far from cancelling each other out, they coexist and influence one another: Japanese publishers launch their own vertical platforms, webtoons are published in paper volumes, and readers navigate between the two worlds. To discover the webtoon is to observe a young form in full expansion, which says much about connected Korea — and to learn Korean is also to be able to read these stories, manhwa and webtoon, in the language where they scroll, panel after panel, toward the bottom of the screen.

FAQ#

What is a webtoon? A webtoon (웹툰) is a Korean digital comic designed for vertical reading on a smartphone: one scrolls the screen from top to bottom. Generally in colour and published in episodes, it was born in Korea at the start of the 2000s.

What is the difference between manhwa, manga and manhua? Manhwa (Korean), manga (Japanese) and manhua (Chinese) share the same characters and denote the comics of each country. Manhwa is the Korean comic; the webtoon is its vertical digital form, native to the web.

What is the difference between webtoon and manga? Manga is printed, in black and white, read from right to left. The webtoon is digital, in colour, read vertically by scrolling and designed for mobile. They are two distinct visual grammars.

Which series are drawn from webtoons? Many hits, such as Itaewon Class, Sweet Home, Tower of God, Solo Leveling or Lookism, are originally webtoons adapted into K-dramas or animation, contributing to the global reach of Korean culture.

Photo credits: the images used in this article come from Pexels and Unsplash and are royalty-free.