South Korea's booming 'webtoons'
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
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.
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.
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.
>> Annual profit/revenue (not quite sure) of Samsung Electronics (not Samsung overall, just Electronics) was greater than or equal to top 9 Japanese electronic firms combined, including Sony.
I think the comparison does not include Sony Films though? Not quite sure.
A lot of people look at the economic miracle of West Germany and Japan post WW2 with admiration. Amazing accomplishments for sure. But both nations already had well established education, technology, institutions, and etc that were already present at end of WW2. Sure, a lot of it had been destroyed/disrupted because of the war. But they were there.
South Korea on the other hand had none of that. S. Korea never had the core ingredients needed for economic recovery. In 1945, literacy rate in Korea was 22%. Korea as a whole was just barely joining the modern world around 1900, a lot of it due to the colonization by Japan.
It is an amazing achievement.
I think S. Korea also feels more threatened than others because it shares land/sea border with China, Russia, and Japan. China/Russia, 2 most powerful nations with non-democratically elected government...
EDIT: Before someone yells at me for putting down Japan and/or putting Korea on a pedestal, I am just stating a fact I read. For sure, Japan has had amazing achievement in the past.
They're quite admirable as a people in most respects but that's just misguided. Especially since without US backing China would definitely want to have a word or two with them about those war criminals. And today's China is not China during the century of humiliation.
On the other hand South Korea did everything peacefully. They deserve their praise 120%. I just wish they'd be reunited with North Korea peacefully and with the resulting country following the South Korean model.
That would be a great counterbalance in the region to Chinese ambition.
It's far from a "few idiots". The place is super controversial. A nice place, but super controversial, politically.
Like I say above, why do a few idiots waving flags at Meiji mean that _the entire country_ needs to be "taken down" like the OP says?
I stress that this is "Japan"- the whole of Japan. Not the idiots waving flags at Meiji. Are all Japanese nationalist assholes?
Common ultra-nationalist beliefs are fairly odious: e.g. Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers, the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and the killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 "Nanjing massacre" were exaggerated or fabricated.
Tokyo Trial https://www.netflix.com/in/title/80091880
As a not unrelated aside, nationalism is on the rise everywhere and if this doesn't change there will be new wars and possibly another (very) big one. I am personally freaked out very much by the rise of nationalism in the EU where I live. I'm not one to trivialise waving flags at a war memorial.
But- again, why does this indict the entire of Japan? Are all Japanese likely to go wave imperial flags at Meiji?
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.
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...
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.
Of course, the translations (and the scans) are often a bit crap. But you can still get an idea of the original's quality.
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.
Planet Money: Joke Theft https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/06/710404524/epis...
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.
Since AI can't create great pieces of art or digital works in a short amount of time, there still is scarcity.
> 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.
Is the situation in South Korea similar or different? I don't know enough about either; just thinking out loud.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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+)
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.
Some of this just comes down to cultural differences. Most US novels don’t get translated to Japanese.
I'm a moderate enthusiast-- probably have like 200 volumes of English translations. I am not really interested in digital platforms, both because then you get no physical souvenir, and because I don't trust them to not implode suddenly. I suspect most long-term fans have a series or two they loved but had to give up on because the translator went bust or it disappeared from whatever service they subscribed to. Once bitten, twice shy...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Before finding webtoons she had no interest in graphic novels, comics, anime, etc. and still doesn’t. She just likes her webtoons.
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.
[1] https://www.japaniac.de/tokyopops-meistverkaufte-manga-im-ma...
Here is also the top 15 of 2017 for KAZÉ (the covers say it all): https://www.anime2you.de/news/183746/die-top-15-meistverkauf...
How does your source compare with this: https://www.amazon.de/gp/bestsellers/books/698198
The list is about what I'd expect with mostly shounen near the top but there is decent yaoi representation. Not a single what I would consider normal shoujo though.
American: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Manga/zgbs/...
I would say this more about reflects my guess. 30% for the DE site and 15% for the American one.
I wouldn't necessarily give an Amazon list too much weight. Bookstores here in Germany are everywhere and people like to buy there, especially because you can take a quick look into the manga you are buying. So the lists from publishers tend to be worth more. The good part about the Amazon bestseller list is that it includes Carlsen manga where I couldn't find any info from the publisher regarding sales.
Another publisher I couldn't find anything on is Egmont Manga. The list for spring 2019 says it all though: https://www.egmont-manga.de/fruehjahr-2019/
So no, 30% is definitely wrong.
When the Manga boom was at it's height in the US (like 2005 or so) IIRC the consumers of Manga were something like almost 60% women or girls, and I doubt it has changed drastically. And while I remember Peach Girl and Nana and Hana Yori Dango (and the aforementioned fruits basket!) being popular at the time, I don't think they were 60% of the sales. And Shoujo is less successful in the US today than 15 years ago.
(There are plenty of theories for why, elaborated elsewhere.)
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 :)
I was excited and was seeking out the original poster to see if they were after some programming skills, but it doesn't seem like the project went past the concept art phase. Shame, I would have loved to work on it.
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...
And of course I'm talking about games that cost 50+ million dollars to develop. I find your comment about different games to smack a bit segregationist. The female market dominate many hardcore games including the most popular game of 2016/2017 Arena of Valor: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/01/02/57... You'll also notice a marked rise in gamers who play more recent games like Overwatch and Fortnite because they pander to men just a little less. Anyway I'm talking about core games and if you target correctly there should be as many girls playing those as in mobile games too.
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.
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.
I don't know what PA is, but Girl Genius and Gunnerkrigg Court have RSS feeds that tell you when a new page is available. Of the webcomics I read, only a very small minority doesn't support RSS, although that might be selection bias on my part. Most seem to be using some kind of WordPress plugin specialized for comic websites, which provides RSS support out of the box.
They need some better VCs.
[1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [2] https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-co...
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.
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.
I’d liken the ethos here to: “Move slow and never break things.”
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.
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).
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.
i’ve tried a couple of these services, but they were quite subpar.
I wouldn't want to read it on a non E-ink screen, or have to scroll within a single page though.
I use the SimpleComic reader on OSX, first removing the menu and then fullscreening it. This requires me to download the manga beforehand. It works for me since I don't read that much manga.
Now that I have an ipad I wonder how well it could work.
But short search says "Manga Storm CBR" is according to your demand. Search for cbr, which is the common fileformat for comic-archives. You can also widen the search and search for comic-apps or reader-apps in general. Manga seems to be often a bit to specific in those cases.
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
I feel old.
You can see more of them at comic.naver.com [1]
[0]: https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=...
The site also has stuff made by western artist these days.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
I agree. The obsolete label applies to print manga, not the medium itself.
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.