The vertical format: how webtoons redrew Asian comics

A comics page is read in a zigzag: the eye runs down a column, jumps back up, comes down again, and then the reader turns the page. A webtoon is not read like that. It is read the way you scroll a conversation: one thumb, in a straight line, never going back. That tiny shift, from wrist to thumb, was enough to produce a complete narrative grammar, and then to have it adopted by the two largest comics markets on earth.

Webtoons did not win because they were Korean. They won because they were vertical.

A Korean accident of timing#

The format was born in a hole in the market. In the late 1990s, the Asian financial crisis finished off the manhwabang (만화방), the rental reading rooms where most Korean manhwa was consumed. Publishers collapsed, artists lost their outlet, and South Korea entered the very decade in which it rolled out one of the densest broadband networks in the world.

The web portals picked up the pieces. Daum opened its comics section in 2003, Naver launched its own in 2004, and both gave the material away for free, the way you give away a weather forecast: to bring users back every single day.

The name most historians of the medium point to is Kang Full. His series Sunjeong Manhwa (순정만화), published on Daum from 2003, dropped the page and told its story going downward. The gesture looks trivial. It changes everything: with no page, there is no layout constraint, and therefore no reason to compress a scene to make it fit.

What scrolling does to storytelling#

On a printed page, the space between panels, what comics theory calls the gutter, is fixed. In a webtoon it is elastic. An author can drop three hundred pixels of nothing between two images, and that nothing becomes time: the reader scrolls, sees nothing, keeps scrolling, and the next panel lands exactly when it wants to.

That elasticity makes the webtoon a medium of pacing more than of composition. The techniques it produced are now standard:

• The delayed beat: a long blank before a reveal, impossible on paper, where the eye always catches the panel below.
• The long panel: a fall, a corridor, a mountain drawn several screens tall, which you physically travel through.
• The episode cut: every weekly instalment ends on an image built to be the last one for a week.
• Sound design: several Korean platforms trigger music or an effect at a precise point in the scroll.

The textbook case remains Bongcheon-dong Ghost (봉천동 귀신), published by the artist Horang in 2011, which drops an animated image exactly where the reader's thumb is heading. The trick travelled the world as a screenshot, usually without anyone knowing it came from a webtoon.

Colour, meanwhile, is not an aesthetic choice but an economic consequence: with no printing cost, black and white saves nothing. Webtoons are therefore in colour by default, which cascades into how they are made.

A studio, not an author#

This is the part readers see least and that weighs most. A Japanese weekly manga rests on one mangaka and their assistants, with a clear hierarchy and a single name on the cover. A successful webtoon looks more like a small studio: writer, line artist, colourist, digital background artist, sometimes an art director, often gathered in a production company that sells the series to the platform.

The division exists because the cadence demands it. Publishing weekly, in colour, in a format that eats images at speed, is not sustainable alone for long. The downside is well known in the industry: the health of Korean creators is a recurring subject of debate, and webtoon creator unions have spent years asking for clearer contracts and workable schedules.

The business model that followed the format#

The format alone would not have been enough. What tipped the market was a pricing invention: waiting.

In 2014 Kakao launched gidarimyeon muryo (기다리면 무료), "free if you wait": the next episode unlocks by itself after a few days, or immediately for a small fee. The reader is not paying for the story, they are paying for their own impatience. Naver, for its part, had set up a scheme in 2013 to share advertising and merchandising revenue with creators.

That pairing, free on the surface and micropaid underneath, exports far better than a catalogue does. It is what the Korean platforms carried abroad.

The spread: Japan, China, the West#

Japan watched the format from a distance, then joined in. LINE Manga, backed by Korea's Naver, embedded itself in Japanese habits from 2013; Piccoma followed; and the legacy publishers eventually opened their own vertical-scroll imprints, tate sukurōru (縦スクロール), with series conceived for the screen rather than adapted from the page.

In China, Kuaikan Manhua, launched in 2014, applied the same grammar to manhua and targeted mobile readers directly, with short, colourful, strongly romantic series.

In the West, the breakthrough came through apps: WEBTOON in English from 2014, then Naver's acquisition of Wattpad and Kakao's of Tapas in 2021, two deals that bought pools of writers and readers more than they bought catalogues.

The most visible outcome, though, is not an app but a television screen: Itaewon Class, Sweet Home, All of Us Are Dead and Solo Leveling are webtoon adaptations, and a growing share of Korean drama comes from that pool rather than from original scripts.

Webtoons did not digitise comics. They redrew them for a screen seventeen centimetres tall, and the rest of the world ended up holding the same screen.

What the format cannot do#

It would be dishonest to present scrolling as a gain without a cost. The format loses things the page did well.

It loses simultaneity: on a double page the eye takes in ten panels at once and reads a composition, which scrolling forbids by construction. It loses skim-rereading, very handy in complex narratives. And it makes virtuoso page layout, the kind Katsuhiro Ōtomo or Naoki Urasawa built careers on, essentially unusable.

In the other direction, print copes badly with the vertical: paper collections of webtoons force images to be recut, and the result often disappoints readers who came from the app.

The two forms will therefore coexist, as cinema and television eventually did. But the question is no longer whether vertical will last: it is how many creators, ten years from now, will have learned to tell a story going downward before they ever learned to compose a page.

Read alsoWebtoon: how Korea reinvented the comic

The wider history of Korean webtoons, from the Naver and Kakao platforms to the K-drama pipeline, is covered in our survey of the medium.

Read alsoSolo Leveling: how a Korean manhwa conquered the world

Solo Leveling shows the full journey: web novel, vertical webtoon, then Japanese anime.

FAQ#

Are webtoon and manhwa the same thing? No. Manhwa means Korean comics in general, print included. Webtoon means the vertical-scrolling digital format born on Korean portals in the 2000s.

Why are webtoons almost always in colour? Because colour costs nothing to distribute. Manga's black and white is a legacy of paper and ink prices, not an original aesthetic choice.

Do webtoons read well on a computer? They read, but they lose part of their effect. Long gaps and delayed reveals are calibrated for the height of a phone screen held in the hand.

Do webtoon creators work alone? Rarely beyond amateur series. Professional series almost always rest on a team, split between writing, line art, colour and backgrounds.

Is the vertical format arriving in Europe too? Yes, through apps first, then local imprints. Several European publishers have launched scroll-native series, with distinctly uneven results so far.

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Photo credits: images in this article come from Wikimedia Commons and are under free licence.