Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons | Hacker News Reader

Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons

economist.com

190 pointspigtailgirl188 comments

> Last year the manga print market shrank by 2.3% to ¥265bn ($1.9bn).

The value of manga is really hard to put into a clear revenue value. Similar to Pokemon, the properties generate revenue in so many different formats, that the manga itself is merely a carrier for the property at large.

The merch, computer games, pachinko and anime add up to a significantly bigger value than merely $2 billion. For ex: just the 3 biggest recent manga movies: 'Demon Slayer Mugen Train, One Piece Red, Jujutsu Kaisen 0' made a total of $1billion at the box office.

I'm all for disruption in the manga business. The working conditions for the mangaka (authors) are inhumane and slavish. Early deaths and chronic health problems are the norm.

But, Korean webtoons are nowhere close to the quality or economic value of manga just yet. 'Peerless Dad [1]' is the only one I've found so far that I'd recommend to everyone. Ofc, there is a lot of tropey-wish-fulfillment in the likes of Overgeared, Solo Leveling & Sword king, but 2/3 of those have ended up in the dreaded K-manwha churning powercreep and none of them do anything particularly new.

[1] https://webtoon.kakao.com/content/%EC%95%84%EB%B9%84%EB%AC%B...

Yes, and IMO people also put too much emphasis on which country the art comes from.

While webtoons are primarily Korean at that point, Korean authors are also publishing manga in Japan and participate a lot in the anime/manga/game/illustration culture in general (same for Chinese or Taiwan artists, or from wherever they live really). The net and pervasive use of digital tools has really blended the borders, and there are many artists who happen to speak Japanese and publish in Japan, but come from different backgrounds.

It's easy to see in the game or anime community (Korean/Taiwan studios are already at a very high quality level), the last Fire Emblem for instance has a Brazilian character designer.

I also think the same thing is already happening in reverse, with Japanese artists going for the international market when their style would have more impact/better reception there.

The country still has relevance as it acts as a kind of "brand". Different Countries have different culture, history and preferences, resulting in different plots and characters. Artists know that, and often adapt according to the country they are working toward. This allows people to better choose their preferred "flavor" of content.

Though, this is just at the moment the case. It would be better to find some way to name those flavors independent of the country, to remove the underlining problems that sometimes spread in such setups.

FWIW: webtoons are huge in Thailand, I don't know where the content comes from (Korea, probably?) but it's a format that lends itself really well to translation.

I would love to see more crazy, experimental, weird stuff on webtoons that might diverge completely from the anime/manga/game/illustration aesthetic. The form itself is so promising!

>the last Fire Emblem for instance has a Brazilian character designer

Wait, what? Who?

Was thinking of Mika Pikazo

I remembered her as from Brazil, but it looks like she was there only a couple of years after high school. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mika_Pikazo

I agree with everything you said, but want to add, that with regards to this article it's also just the Economist being the Economist. When they say X eclipses Y, they mean makes more money. The fact is that culture is a completely different, parallel value system, that they just don't grok. The most culturally valuable things, frequently only have limited, or no economic value, contemporaneous with their creation, and they're just not gonna get that.

I've been watching the Webtoons stuff, and I'm gonna give Peerless Dad another look because you mentioned it, but I couldn't summon up a single one that has really impacted me.

Peerless Dad is excellent. It starts off with a trope (secretly high-potential martial artist) and gimmick (but he has triplets). But, unlike others which fizzle out once the gimmick gets old, this one actually gets better because of its main gimmick. (the MC being a dad).

The MC is competent, knows his limits and navigates a complex class system to set his own children for success and safety. And then it has its badass moments to bring it all together, which is far more rewarding with the time it spends doing the 'boring' groundwork.

Very surprised to see a comment about Peerless Dad on HN, and it being top comment. Huge fan of the series. But surprisingly, I've found the spin off series Administrator Kang Jin Lee to be even better. Peerless Dad has suffered a bit from trying to weave too many threads simultaneously which takes away from the focus on the main character. As a result, it occasionally struggles to thread the needle, especially with the politicking subplot. Administrator KJL starts with an incredible premise (What if you took a high functioning autistic amoral sociopath and tried to teach him how to blend in with normies) and has kept building on that premise to some really good shit. IMO it hasn't suffered any of the same inconsistencies of Peerless Dad. Still love PD though.

Cool, I'm sure I saw it go by, thinking I didn't give it enough of a chance.

I think that even if you stick with a purely economic analysis, looking at the print market size might not be at all right? There's so much money in secondary goods (well, for the publishers). People have mentioned movies of course, but just general merchandising is a huge win (see Star Wars as a good US example of "the primary material isn't the point")

Having said that I don't know anything about the Korean market on this front, and I can totally see a legitimate decline from Japanese publishing just like in many other media spaces over the past couple of decades.

Yeah, and this is kind of a baffling oversight considering the value of franchises is well understood. There's even a table on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...

Edit: I don't know what happened to this article - it used to list a LOT more Japanese stuff - Bleach, Naruto, Pokemon, Mario easily dominate stuff like the MCU in terms of value.

Looks like some source issues and editor drama from the talk page[1] and the edit that removed Mario[2].

The editor drama is apparently a user who made many thousands of edits over the last 17(!) years, using multiple accounts, and misrepresented sources[3][4][5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_highest-grossing_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_highest-g...

[3] https://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/avicennian-logic.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...

> The fact is that culture is a completely different, parallel value system, that they just don't grok.

No, they just report on that. They report on money-related things. Doesn't mean they don't understand other things.

That's fair, overstatement on my part.

> they mean makes more money. The fact is that culture is a completely different, parallel value system, that they just don't grok

You mean a newspaper about the economy has to explain to you that they're talking about the business side of things, you can't just assume good faith on the part of the author and instead assume that they're some unthinking, cultureless robot who only cares about money?

Yes, mea culpa. I was calling out that I expect them to concentrate on economics, beyond that I surely went a clause too far.

If you took the time to read The Economist, it would be clear that culture is well understood. In fact, a section titled “Culture” features in every issue. More broadly, I would go so far as to say that topics of a socio-cultural nature are de rigueur, without which, The Economist would surely be reduced to a shell of its current self.

That's fair. I'm sure I did not give a fully-balanced view of the Economist.

Yep, many countries can access the latest chapters for free from official distribution channels and yet Oda of One Piece is estimated to have net worth over 200M.

One Piece has spawned 56 video games, 18 movies, had a themed section in Tokyo Tower and a long tail of licensing on clothes, toys, snacks.

I am not sure there is that kind of verticality on the web toons market yet BUT I have observed that there is an orthogonality to the recent new koreaboos and this wave (spurred by Squid Games, Black Pink, BTS etc) has pretty broad reach so let's see where this goes...

First I’ve seen someone mention Peerless Dad in the wild. It and maybe-sometimes Magician are the only webtoons I’ve found which felt like there was good writing. No doubt it’s because Peerless Dad was originally a light novel and this is the authors second time telling the story.

I liked Whale Star, too.

One more with an interesting story is Sweet Home.

It also feels like the manwha QOL situation is no better than the manga one. The illustrator for solo leveling died just a few months back. The industry seems just as predatory if not worse, and the publisher field a lot more concentrated.

> I'm all for disruption in the manga business. The working conditions for the mangaka (authors) are inhumane and slavish. Early deaths and chronic health problems are the norm.

I mean, what we call disruption tend to worsen workers conditions. Half of the disruption is "breaking existing regulation" and the other half is "finding loophole so that you can take advantage of someone weaker".

I couldn't see any episodes at that link, but https://www.peerlessdad.online/ worked for me.

I actually happen to work in this industry, and this is definitely correct. We've actually shifting towards licensing more webtoons than manga, because in the digital world, manga doesn't sell very well (unless you're dealing with Shounen Jump content which is all taken anyway), and webtoons have a huge growing popularity. It's kind of funny when I look at our platform's stats, how the mobile audience is mainly webtoons and the web audience is mainly manga (and much smaller).

The Japanese publishers definitely know this is a huge issue imo, unlike what this article says. It's hard not to when a Korean app combining webtoons and manga (Piccoma) has dominated the Japanese Play/Apple store's rankings and shown the publishers the potential of the market. It's kind of humiliating honestly. That's why they're trying to get in on the business by spinning up webtoon studios and doing manga -> webtoon conversions. Some are doing OK, most aren't.

Note for anyone interested in entering the market: Korean webtoons currently consist mostly of a duopoly between Kakao and Naver. When a good webtoon is produced, the studio usually has to sign an exclusive contract with one of them, and they both have either launched platforms in all popular foreign languages, or have bought out the biggest ones, so squeezing in is not very easy. On that note, I'm very surprised this article doesn't mention the alternative: Chinese webtoons. They're pretty huge as well. Another fun fact: It's kind of hard to find "webtoons" if that's what you're looking for, because Naver tries to scare anyone who wants to use that word (they also own the "Webtoon" platform, which is larger than any other in existence in the foreign market). You'll see stuff like "Smarttoon", "Mangatoon", "Vericomix", and other made-up terms that really just mean webtoon.

You used the word humiliating, which I found so strong I had to check the numbers myself. They are every bit as shocking as you made it sound. Yet another area of Japanese culture that Korea/China has been able to just take minor steps to digitally modernize, and in turn exponentially improve it's globally mass-marketability. Korea did it in music, China (and to some extent Korea) has done it in gaming, and it really does seem like Korea/China have done it in comics. Thanks for the tip, info I've gained from the last few hours of reading due to your comment will hit the pages of at least a handful of my slide decks next year.

Looking at what has actually come out of that push for "global mass-marketability", which is to say a lot of huge money machines and not a lot of art, the worst thing that could result from this is Japanese publishers trying to replicate this, as basically none of the internationally successful Japanese auteur creators would have had their works greenlit if they'd had to pass some global mass-marketability criteria.

Yeah I agree with you on all the way down to the very foundational fiber of my being. Luckily though Japanese publishers will at most just add webtoons on top of their current operations and that will be that. Jpop still more or less exactly the same as before YG and Hybe made Idols universal, Japanese games are for the most part still as unique as the were before Mihoyo and Smilegate changed the ARPG industry landscape. I sincerely believe that Shueisha, Kodansha, and the broader manga sphere will remain largely the same as we move in to the future.

I work in Media merchant banking (Investment Banking + Private Equity), so what webtoons will possibly allow me to do is show Western-raised or older generation generation capital holders another vector by which Asian literary media is a worthwhile investment. I'd walk a mile through broken glass to funnel 100 mil USD into the manga industry, but obviously the amount of opportunities that arise where I can attempt to push the needle in that direction is slim. Webtoons might be a viable vector in some cases where manga isnt financially, and I've seen enough relatively impressive webtoons to feel that money is better spent there than most other places.

Are you following what's going on with these online serial novel platforms like Qidian and Japanese equivalents? They seem to be the wellspring for a lot of the IP recently but penetration to the west still seems kinda low.

It's really interesting how authors use these kind of narrative dark patterns to keep readers buying chapters and the effect that has on the story they end up writing.

Like Shousetsuka ni Narou? I've actually seen novels originating there in an English small-town HMV with surprisingly prominent placement, and a similar amount of shelf space as Marvel and DC comics combined. Listed as "Manga Novels" for some reason. There were a few xianxia-looking titles there, but I don't follow Chinese media so I don't know whether they were originally web novels or not.

Given that HMV is a huge chain that mainly sells records and BluRays, they'd have to be pretty established to be there and not in a specialist bookseller or comic shop.

On the last paragraph: With how frequently audiences end up being dissatisfied with the endings of popular serialised works, I'm quite close to just giving up on serialised fiction entirely, or at the very least only considering reading or watching something once it's over. Whether it's manga (good anime adaptations avoid this problem, bad ones exacerbate it with filler arcs), US seasonal TV, live-service games, or novels that have "Part 1" in their title, the problems all end up being the same. Either it's unpopular and has to wrap up in less time than planned, resulting in aborted arcs and contrived endings, or it's popular and the author decides (or is encouraged by big piles of money) to drag it out beyond the original planned run, resulting in poor pacing, retcons, dubious plot twists, re-treading old narrative points and filler arcs.

Yeah I've been hip to the web novel stuff for the last 5 years. The stuff has an absolute death grip on Chinese fiction, and some of it is really quite spectacular. On a whole I consider it to be a very Chinese development, but some titles get surprisingly large global readership. It's a clever modernization of the Japanese light novel industrial complex, but I think fictional literature as leisure is just not practiced enough in the West for web novels to ever have a similar type of impact.

    basically none of the internationally successful 
    Japanese auteur creators would have had their works 
    greenlit if they'd had to pass some global 
    mass-marketability criteria

Agreed. Japan has produced a lot of properties with global appeal, but I can't think of any successful properties that were intentionally designed with the international market in mind.

The domestic Japanese manga scene is so competitive and so crowded... creators basically push themselves to within an inch of their lives trying to make it in that market, appealing to the home audience. Most don't succeed. The anime market is largely fueled by manga properties, so this is largely true for that industry as well.

The game market is somewhat similar, aside from the (absolutely enormous, but fairly singular) exception that is Nintendo.

I'm actually quite thankful for this. Despite much of it being readily available in a translated form for American audiences... maybe I'm fooling myself but it feels like Japanese pop culture has remained relatively undiluted.

Sonic the Hedgehog seems to designed for international market and not much popular in Japan.

That's a good one. He was specifically designed in large part to appeal to American audiences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(character)...

As another HNer quipped, though: Sega's uneven stewardship of that franchise sometimes makes you wonder if there's any plan at all!

I'd question if Sonic the Hedgehog was 'designed' at all. The scattershot approach to media and branding they've taken over the decades feels largely reactive.

His initial design has been pretty well chronicled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(character)...

It has definitely been an uneven and chaotic ride compared to Nintendo's handling of the Mario franchise, though. Scattershot, indeed.

It's an interesting contrast in other ways too.

Mario is something close to a blank slate with no real personality. He's basically just a "seal of quality" - if it's a Mario game, you know it's a game that has received Nintendo's full attention to quality and is going to be accessible to all ages. You don't ever really "like" Mario. You like Mario games.

Whereas Sonic is an actual character, albeit one that has been developed in wildly inconsistent ways.

What's really baffling to me is the uneven quality of Sonic games. There have been some downright bad ones. You'd think Sega would have viewed him as their crown jewel. But there are a lot of times it felt like they were cranking out bad Sonic games just to stay afloat or something. It is almost impossible to think of Nintendo releasing bad Mario games.

It's odd to suggest that Chinese games have eclipsed Japanese games in global mass-marketability. The complete and exhaustive list of games developed in China with global mass-market appeal: Genshin Impact. Meanwhile, in Japan's corner: gestures broadly at half the gaming industry. Are you including games like LoL or PUBG that were merely purchased by Chinese companies after becoming popular?

I've had a somewhat similar feeling with the American-developed offshoot of Stable Diffusion by NovelAI suddenly granting everyone the ability to churn out hundreds of pieces of fanart of Japanese IPs with little effort. I also remember reading a Japanese tweet that spoke of the same sentiment related to foreign countries adapting parts of Japan's culture (Genshin Impact being one example).

I'm yet to find something I'd like to read. I'm a big fan of slice of life elements mixed with fantasy and so far haven't found anything on the Korean and Chinese side that interests me. It's all power fantasy or soap operas. There doesn't seem to be none in between.

Talking about Sousou no Frieren and Houseki no Kuni. Creative comedy like Dungeon Meshi. So far I'm yet to find some webtoon that interests me.

I'm definitely not disagreeing that manga can be more interesting. I'm mainly a manga reader myself, and find many more interesting series covering esoteric topics. But it's about appealing to the largest possible audience, and the reality (and I say this once again based on my and other's stats) is that currently, the male audience wants some variation of the escapist video game or medieval Europe setting with the weak-to-overpowered protagonist using swords and sorcery, probably reincarnated or time-traveling from the life of a loser/weakling. The female audience wants a medieval Europe setting where the protagonist (probably originally an average-looking female in our world or theirs) is either a "villainess", maid, knight or someone other position that makes is possible to have a reverse harem of hot guys with a sadistic or cold-to-warm (tsundere) personality. Those setups are being endlessly mined for new series, just adjust the variables and bam, new series.

I do think that there are also some unique webtoons out there, you're just going to have trouble finding them because they're buried beneath the huge pile of more widespread popular series, which is what all the artists with talent are focusing on (Korean webtoon studios, and the industry as a whole, is a lot more profit-driven). It's also easy to judge a webtoon by its cover and think "oh yet another OP protagonist". Try some out, maybe you'll like one!

> I'm a big fan of slice of life elements mixed with fantasy and so far haven't found anything on the Korean ... . It's all power fantasy or soap operas.

As a Korean who used to read webtoon since the very start, this is what I feel these days too. There are more webtoons than ever, but they are all so generic.

Manga is more culturally developed, but it's just that it makes less money

The term normally used is 'manhwa'. Webtoons can be from any place (and there are many Chinese ones too), manhwa is the Korean word for comics (so it can be physical or digital). Though slightly different, the words do get used interchangeably.

Manhwa are very mobile friendly, the language is simple, and most notably they are colorful, which attracts audiences and makes it quite accessible. Compare it to some of the more dense manga you might read where sometimes a panel requires a lot of pinching and zooming.

For sure though, as the article points out, there are a lot of amazing and intriguing stories in manga, which have better story density compared to the thinner, spread out stories in manhwa which are catering to an audience that just wants to keep scrolling. The artstyle too, I don't think we're going to see anything close to Junji Ito or Berserk style work in webtoon format anytime soon.

But anyway this trend of manhwa's popularity has been noticeable for several years now. The top entries on manga 'aggregator' sites have been manhwa as well.

> The term normally used is 'manhwa'.

I don't know about English usage, but in Korean these are different concepts. "Manhwa" (만화, maan-hwaa) means "comics", usually in print. The Korean word for an online comic is "webtoon" (웹툰, ooeb-toon). This is the usage, for example, on Naver: NAVER 웹툰 is the title of https://comic.naver.com. Of course the webtoons borrow a lot from manhwa style, but one buys/rents manhwa at a store and reads webtoons on the subway. So they are different concepts and "webtoon" is the proper Korean term for this phenomenon.

For (at least within scanlation scene) english usage: Manga is comic originated from Japan Manhwa is comic originated from Korea Manhua is comic originated from China

"Tank is an armored vehicle originated in the UK, char d'assaut is an armored vehicle originated in France, Panzer is an armored vehicle originated in Germany." It's fine to call them all "tanks" and it's fine to call all East Asian comics "comics" or even "manga".

I can see the logic of calling east asian comics "comics". But why would an English speaker use a Japanese term, "manga" to refer to all east Asia comics?

This is also what I have seen in other online communities that aggregate such works.

Still people can say "reading manhwa" when they read webtoon. Webtoon is still manhwa. I also say I read 만화 to my friend who read on Naver and Daum, who also often say 만화

It's worth noting that manga, manwha, manhua, are slightly different ways to pronounce what are essentially the same characters which mean "comics" across those respective languages: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%BC%AB%E7%95%AB

I think that's because Korean and Chinese usages are loanword from Japanese manga. Japanese version of Wikipedia traces etymology back to 17th-18th century pseudo-Chinese word, later extended to include Western comics which became the roots of modern day manga.

I must disagree. It's accurate that the word "webtoon" can refer to Chinese webtoons as well – but "webtoon" is what is used to refer to digital publication + the style of panel layout designed to be swiped vertically on a screen. "Manhwa" predate and extend beyond this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goong_(manhwa) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_House_(manhwa) are two that got big and were adapted to hell and back) being the general term for Korean comics – which, in the print era, had the typical print layout. I think it's worthwhile to be precise in these conversations because there are Japanese webtoons as well these days, which would properly constitute "manga" as well, and if we're mixing up all the "comics" words from different languages with the trends in their formats, it's going to be a pain to discuss.

True. In Korea, we never say Japanese comics, manga, but just say Japanese manhwa. It is only a generic term for comics/cartoons.

Yes as I've said they are different, but get used interchangeably. You can try your best to be precise in the conversations but there is too much incorrect momentum behind the wrong words sadly! It's like calling things fonts when you actually mean typeface. Or GPS when you actually mean GNSS.

I mean, one thing said was "Manhwa are very mobile friendly, the language is simple, and most notably they are colorful" which is true of "webtoons", not of "manhwa".

I don't agree that there's too much incorrect momentum behind the words; what I see in fan/piracy circles tends to be pretty clear about it.

Manhwa have definitely had more of a strict formula to them than most other contemporary comics, at least the ones I've viewed. Most of the stories seem to be copy-pastes of a "weak guy becomes tough guy" power fantasy, with characterizations falling along class and gender stereotypes. Illustrations are likewise industrial in nature, using the same posable doll figures to churn out basic talking head + fighting panels. I can't recall one that did good establishing shots or worked the vertical layout for interesting composition.

That said, I still read the stuff on occasion. It's still comics, and not far in the adherence to formula.

Isn't the "weak guy becomes tough guy" power fantasy make the majority of the manga market, at least in the west?

Manga and anime is very diverse, and yet, only the "shounen" style seems to represented, and that's not even the full spectrum of what shounen has to offer. I don't know much about manhwa, maybe there is more depth to what we are served, or maybe it is just that they just focused on what is commercially successful.

> Isn't the "weak guy becomes tough guy" power fantasy make the majority of the manga market, at least in the west?

Shōnen is probably the bigger market, but it’s worth noting that the key to the “style” is that it’s the term for the target market: young boys. There is usually a power accumulation fantasy, but more accurately these are typically coming-of-age stories.

So:

Shōnen: Young Boys

Shōjo: Young Girls

Seinen: Young Men

Josei: Ladies (there is also a separate category for “Young Ladies”)

As you can see, these are less genre terms and more demographic terms.

They’re different kinds of power fantasies. The one in webtoons is called “naroukei” in Japan, has more self identification and a dark brooding incel hero, and implies you’ll get a girlfriend by being really good at video games. Most popular Japanese example is SAO, although the author of that has lightened up a lot and is woke now. (The fantasy novel “isekai” variant has a strange tendency to have the MC buy sex slaves and the author to explain why it’s fine actually.)

Jump comics are the best selling manga in the US, but the brand basically works by having a few big magic power based series (Demon Slayer etc) that draw you in and then a lot of other ones in different genres (Spy X Family is a family comedy). Also, while none of the editor staff are or ever have been women, these are actually appealing to girls.

Rather than a single self-identification MC, Jump’s magic battle shounens tend to have very large ensemble casts who simultaneously have unique superpowers and are in some kind of corporate org chart power ranking. It’s unclear how they figure out that the guy who can turn into lava on Thursdays is rank #5 and the guy whose shoulders are drums and when he bangs the drums your head explodes is #28.

That is increasingly less the case, thankfully. These things do take time though. An interesting parallel is the French market for translated manga, which has a much higher diversity of series in non-shounen demographics available. Hard to know how much of that is due to the French actually being more interested in these demographics, and how much is American publishers believing that manga targeted at other demographics is likely to be less successful and hence mostly going with safe bets.

Additionally in manhuas, some non so usual topice are overreepresented, like a _lot_ of shonnen manhuas about business character success/CEO kind of stuff.

That’s normal for Korea - Kdramas do it all the time too. Not so much in the West.

> Not so much in the West.

There are plenty of soap operas that feature similar plot lines.

Maybe that's because the distributor thinks other genre of manga is so fringed that cannot generate enough revenue to justify the translation?

I dunno, it might be your choices. I have seen way more diverse range of manghwa genres then, say, comic. By diverse, I mean there was comedy, romance, historical drama, workplace dramas, stuff seemingly aimed at stay at home women, you name it.

The stuff you name is stuff aimed at young men or boys. But there is more to it then just that.

And quite often, there's a tower... there is some kind of obsession with a tower which escapes me, but I can understand its usage, it's a convenient way of shifting scenes into something completely new, instead of having to maintain continuity

You have only seen a small part of manhwa and you are trying to define what manhwa is. Way to go, sir. Keep doing it. You may at the end gain a small followers

Well said, and I agree with every point. I love Solo Leveling, and it’s very much action based like Berserk, but it will never reach the same depths of emotion Berserk can elicit.

Caveat emptor: I’ve worked on both manhwa and manga as a scanlation (unofficial translations) proofreader.

True, but one of the things I loved of Solo Leveling (it's finished, right?) is that some times the colors are AMAZING, like there were some panels where I would just stop and get lost in the art for a bit, while that rarely happened to me with black and white manga. Even when it DID happen with manga, it's literally missing an order of magnitude, so IMHO peak manga B&W can barely compare with peak full-color art (and I'm not even saying Solo Leveling is top-level color art, what I'm saying is that it's "very good" and with that it beats "top level" B&W any day IMHO).

I cant disagree that color art has dimensions to it that black and white (and halftones) can’t quite reach.

But to say that color alone makes it better than greyscale… No, I can not agree with that. A matter of taste? Perhaps. But there is some absurdly beautiful art in Manga too.

Starkness, working within constraints, has its own beauty.

And, as an aside, full color manga is becoming a thing too. More and more full color webtoon style comics are coming from Japan; from mangaka.

I'm not saying that color alone makes it better than greyscale, that'd be absurd. What I'm saying is that for the same "percentile of quality", color wins pretty much always.

Since full-color as a set technically includes the B&W set (and in the case on point of Solo Leveling, there are some scenes that are notably impressive while being mostly B&W! or grayscale with a shadow hint in other color) then it's a truism that full-color reaches to heights that B&W can never reach.

An author known for her detail is Kaoru Mori. Her art is really beautiful. And while it’s Josei I think it’s appealing to those outside the usual demographic. It is much better than any webtoon where most suffer from samesie character design.

I suspect you only say this because you read on your phone. The true strength of black-and-white illustration is in being able to see how individual pen strokes have contributed to the feel of the final image. To do this properly you really need a physically large image (and the artist to have started with the intention of producing a physically large image). I didn't think Naoko Takeuchi was that great of an artist until I read the Eternal edition of her magnum opus, and the difference is night and day.

Halftones, delicate hatching and thin lines all turn to mush when anti-aliased, so they just won't show up in a medium optimised for grabbing the attention of the infinite-scrolling phone-reader with thumbnail-sized images.

Are there any particular tools of the trade for scanlations, or does everyone use Photoshop/GIMP and call it a day?

Primarily Photoshop for scanlation. Official workflows will use a combination of Photoshop for retouching and InDesign for lettering/prepress

Yup, photoshop almost exclusively for the redrawers and typesetters, and plain ol' text documents (with some "this line goes on this page in this bubble" shorthand) for translators and proofreaders.

Gimp, sadly, does not really work, since it doesn't represent .psd files the same way photoshop does. It's easier to sail the high seas than it is to get a Gimp workflow working. :(

Thank you for your work.

It's fun (well, when you're working on one you enjoy), and there's plenty of need. If you're on Mangadex, just look for the requests teams are making as part of their headers or footers in scanlated chapters. It's how I found my way in.

Proofreaders in scanlation are basically touching up the translations to make them read well in English (tenses and idioms that don't always translate well), as well as checking for consistency between chapters in tone and spelling.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how it feels like manhua/longstrip webtoon comics has yet to experience its creative peak.

Looking back at the history of manga, it is possible to see how new innovations have played with and manipulated standard ideas of paneling and framing to produce fascinating and artistic work. A seemingly constrained format (small-size black-and-white comic book) becomes a canvas for extraordinary creative expression.

Longstrip comics are not worse than manga, of course, but it feels like creators have yet to explore the edges of the format. What can a longstrip do that a traditional book can’t? How can the limitations of the format be turned into strengths? I wonder if this will come to pass, and how long it will take.

Have you seen this story (must be non-mobile)?

http://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=350217&no=...

If you’re mobile the scrolling breaks. Otherwise it’s an interesting example of the medium.

Manhwa, mànhuà, manga... 漫画.

Ultimately, it's all in line with the rise of South Korea. 1980s : Japan :: 2010s : S. Korea

> sometimes a panel requires a lot of pinching and zooming.

The iPad (12.9") is what got me into comics and manga, the screen size is almost perfect so it's a very pleasant experience.

Do you read 2 pages at a time in landscape mode? I like reading manga on my 11” iPad (in portrait mode), but IIUC this is actually significantly larger than print manga.

On my 12.9" I read one page at a time in portrait. The size is nice since it lets me see the details and small text well without holding the tablet close to my face or zooming.

The 11" model is a very good size for manga reading and allows for this too, though. 11" is my preferred size actually, but I went for the 12.9" instead to be able to better test apps on that model — an app designed for 11" only will have a lot of wasted space running on a 12.9". The miniLED backlighting is nice too, wish that 11" had that.

It is not a form factor everyone takes everywhere. Webtoon can be read comfortably anywhere anytime with mobile phone pretty much everyone has in the hand or in the pocket. That is huger difference.

I think in Japan most manga is still read on paper

Oh, I see. I didn't realize that the term "manhwa" was specifically used for Korean comics. I always just thought it was a general term for any type of webcomic. It's interesting to hear about the differences between manga and manhwa. It sounds like manhwa are more accessible and mobile-friendly, but that manga has a higher story density and more complex art styles. I suppose it's all a matter of personal preference.

In Korea, Manhwa tends to refer to printed comics like Manga, whilst Webtoon refers to online digital comics.

Still in Korea, people often say "read manhwa" on (webtoon platform). Webtoon is just a digital version of manhwa but not separate thing.

You don’t have to comment if you don’t actually know. What you just said is quite wrong.

The medium is the message.

The Japanese manga industry is in dire need of reform and/or revolution, particularly on the working conditions of mangakas and all the involving staffs. However, content and culture are things that I see no webtoons capable of eclipsing Japanese manga (happy to be corrected; the only webtoon I've seriously followed is Peerless Dad).

The manga spectrum is incredibly diverse. Jam-packed action sequences (Sakamoto Days, The Fable), rich and vividly crafted worldbuilding (One Piece, Otoyomegatari, Houseki no Kuni), mesmerizing artwork and paneling (Witch Hat Atelier, The Summer Hikaru Died, Black Paradox), and, above all, poignant narrative and unforgettable characters, where the stories vacillate between the historical, from the quest for gold of two impoverished Irishes (Katabami to Ougon) to the burgeoning of heliocentrism in medieval Europe (Chi: About the Movement of the Earth), the ordinary, like seeing the ghost of Jimi Hendrix (Shiori Experience), and the illusive, including the world of minerals and souls (Houseki no Kuni) or the world inbetween (Alice in Borderland), manga has everything to offer.

Draw-dropping art with amazing story (Berserk, Vagabond) and excellent real-world style mystery/thrillers (Monster, 20th Century Boys).

The world culture in webtoons is worse than manga: one of the biggest - Tower of God - is on indefinite hiatus because the manwhaka has been broken by the non-stop work culture.

Something bizarre that makes you question your existence (Battle Angel Alita, Trigun, Gantz),

scientific stories (dr. Stone, dr. Koto, Wild Life),

theatrical (Akane-banashi, Show ha shoten, act-age),

hobbies / toys (beyblade, Yu-Gi-Oh, let's and go)

Man manga are so diverse!

Alita! I raise you Blame! and Knights of Sidonia. Both amazing sci-fi.

Mangaka work culture really depends on the specific place. In some it isn't too bad, but in many it is. I do think we only hear about the bad cases sometimes

There is no standardization unlike in Korea where they're at least under the same roof, except for the fact that work conditions are the exact same with the only difference being a small and i mean almost near poverty levels guaranteed pay.

Sometimes they like to argue they make more money as content creators, but that's not true as manhwas require much more artists meaning that they actually bring in less due to the requirements and coloring.

Big 'telenovelas are the future of entertainment' energy. Not to run down these innovations, but evaluating success purely in terms of short-duration financial return seems like a mistake. As long as something is best summarized as 'like X for Y', X is still the elephant in the room.

I'm sure we'll see other waves of this as other countries where the legwork of anime is outsourced to (eg Vietnam) starts producing domestic & international success stories.

There's probably some value in the argument of "there are missing spots in the traditional American media marketplace, and right now they're being filled with imported products."

I never really got into American comics, but I have shelves full of manga/manhwa. There's probably things that can to be cherry-picked from it:

* Improved availability to consume the entire franchise. Even one of the worst of the worst, One Piece, is basically a single straight run of 101 (currently) books which are easily obtainable. If I wanted to read "all of Spider-Man", it's likely hundreds of volumes across dozens of sub-titles, some of which are essentally unobtainable except as expensive collectibles.

* Little to no "Cinematic Universe" stuff; this ties into the above concept; I don't need to follow twelve other series to know about the single story I've become invested in.

* The classic "Weekly Jump" style phone-book magazine format is almost a proto-subscription in terms of risk aversion and explorability. If you know you already like one or two products, you can safely buy the (impossibly cheap) book, which gives you chance to explore the other 18 titles in there.

* Some of the zanier premises that work out. One of my favourites was Eyeshield 21, a 37-volume story which effectively turned high school football into a shonen battle drama. Could that have flown even in the US?

It also helps that it is extremely rare to see a manga have a rotating creative team, so you get a much more consistent story and tone, the whole way through.

Having a creator come onto an American comic with a specific enthusiasm for one specific character, theme or trope, and have that dominate for years of that creators' tenure, is really annoying. Also, that creator needing to be aware of previous history (or choosing to ignore it entirely) means you're getting a mixed bag.

I lost interest in Western comics after DC rebooted their universe ("Which time?" you ask? New 52) and it became clear that unless your favourite character was marquee (Superman, Batman, etc), it was completely out of control what was going to change or be ignored about their history. I ended up thinking "if comics aren't going to respect me as a reader, why am I staying around?"

This, of course, got worse with the advent of the MCU and its imitators. Western comics are mostly just idea factories for films now; the "big name" creatives of the past are largely retired, or writing for TV/movies, and the people replacing them have nowhere near the vision (or freedom from Marvel or DC) to create compelling stories.

Manga is completely demolishing Western comics' sales at every turn, and Oda being able to craft twenty years of a narrative (while making me feel rewarded for investing) is an amazing feat.

> Western comics are mostly just idea factories for films now

I'm not denying this, but I find it a hypocritical view when you then compare it with mangas. 99% of manga is produced as an attempt to generate a franchise that will spawn anime series, anime movie(s), real-life movie(s), collectibles, and boatload of related merchandise. If US comics did the same, you'd be looking at 100x the audiovideo production they currently generate.

The view you expose is a typical Western position.

You make a good point. I guess it feels that the manga-to-anime pipeline feels more about straight adaptation, while the comic-to-MCU pipeline is much more about picking over a buffet of characters, beats, "things you know", etc to create "an MCU movie."

I find that this didn't exactly drive people backwards to appreciating or supporting the comics more.

I'm more of a manga reader than an anime watcher, and I can still find enjoyment in reading manga pre-adaptation and then choose not to watch the anime; I guess the same thing can be said about comics ("and then choosing to not watch the movie"), but it somehow feels more authentic, as if they can co-exist separately with the same amount of care from the rights holders?

Perhaps I'm confusing the feeling of authenticity with the idea of there just being so much history for something like Spider-Man, that you're going to have to condense or adapt or like, merge different things into one movie.

I don't know for sure; I still think that the work-for-hire nature of Marvel/DC really leads to a cynicism on my part. You've still got stuff coming out from Image and Dark Horse and the indies that you can "read comics for the comics", but something just feels off.

It's probably a bit of idealizing Japan for being Japan, but I never get the feeling of "if you don't watch the MCU, we don't care about you" like I do with Marvel Comics. If an MCU concept does well enough on film, they're going to backport it back into the comics regardless, so why should I invest in the comics when they're going to be manipulated by something I don't enjoy?

"I'm not denying this, but I find it a hypocritical view when you then compare it with mangas. 99% of manga is produced as an attempt to generate a franchise that will spawn anime series, anime movie(s), real-life movie(s), collectibles, and boatload of related merchandise."

The most popular western comics tend to be owned by a corporation like Disney that hires and fires artists in search of a bottom line. The comic will stay in production until it is no longer profitable.

The most popular manga seem to have some amount of ownership retained by the original author. The manga tend to come to an end when the author retires.

This doesn't mean manga artists are free of capitalistic concerns and western artists are all hacks (though emotionally I feel they kind of are...) but at least when it comes to the most popular books the two systems don't seem to operate that same way.

You're moving the goalposts.

There is not an argument of superiority - both systems are geared towards making money for corporations, they just go about it in slightly different ways. And there is no question that the Japanese thoroughly explored the merchandise and adaptation space much earlier (and with a more systemic approach) than US publishers; so to criticize the US industry for moving towards that same model, seems pointless.

(As for exploitation of workers, US artists and writers might be poor but are not known to kill themselves because they're overworked... They also tend to get more recognition: most popular mangas are produced by pools of artists in studios, often without their names actually attached to them (beyond the title-creator); whereas the story/pencils/inks tradition in US comics tends to surface contributors in most cases. In economic terms, both categories are typically screwed over by corporations anyway, just in different ways.)

I should probably clarify that I don't actually think of American comics as research and development for related media.

That said, in the Japanese system we can distinguish between author and publisher. In the American system the author (for purposes of copyright) is often the publisher.

Authors can have motivations other than making money (even if they want to make money). It's harder to impute such motivations on nonhuman entities like Warner Brothers or Disney.

So the idea that American comics are research and development for related merchandizing seems closer to the truth to me than it does for Japanese comics, either though I wouldn't really describe either product that way.

I don't think the sort of recognition letterers, colorists, or inkers get is worth a whole lot in economic terms under the American system, though I'd agree that manga studios should credit everyone who works on the book.

Yea this is the effect of keeping stories and characters way past a human being's shelf life and span of interest. Call it capitalism and milking money off established IP, I suppose.

A good amount of manga does seem to allow their characters and works to die off (with a few exceptions).

> Western comics are mostly just idea factories for films now

Personally I'm still finding interesting continuations in the recent evolution of the x-men mythos, where they have an actual nation now, all mutants included. DC comics seem to have come to a standstill with supermans/batmans in different favors and what-ifs.

I wonder if the big comics publishers have ever explored something like Jump. You have to fill a lot of pages with a lot of, honestly, garbage. Stuff that gets cancelled in 3 months. Shipping all over the place costing up the wazoo. And you probably can't get away with as much massive exploitation as in the Japanese industry.

There are of course a lot of short story magazines doing similar stuff, but given how labor intensive comics work is, the genre hyperfocus the major publishers suffer from, and the impracticality of the physical format for distribution in the US... maybe a digital thing could work somewhere.

Digital as a subscription service has most of the good things about the Jump-style concept.

* The pricing needs to be at a level where casual fans can say "I'm reading 2 or 3 things, and that's enough to justify the overall subscription."

* The audience gets a regular drip of new series launches, so there's low-risk discovery.

* A customer's tastes for individual series can change, and series can end, without having to change the overall product they're buying.

They can probably get better analytics than fan surveys with an online product too.

They absolutely need to present it as "the entire Marvel/DC/Top Cow/etc universe for $XX per month" though, to avoid silo-related frustration. Nobody wants to pay for a subscription to Batman and then hit a paywall that says "Batman went to the Utility Belt Accessories Trade Show in Metropolis, buy a Superman subscription to continue reading."

Manga sometimes has situations where a story moves from one serialization to another, but that's less necessary when you aren't dealing with physical publishing constraints.

Personally, it’s not that surprising that comics written for a smartphone sized infinite scroll canvas are now outearning those designed for book-sized canvasses. Same thing happened with mobile games over consoles, and I haven’t seen anyone argue that that will reverse.

> Yet Japanese manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons. Last year the manga print market shrank by 2.3% to ¥265bn ($1.9bn). The size of the global webtoons market was meanwhile valued at $3.7bn—and projected to reach $56bn by 2030.

Manga market is valued at 4.5bn USD (613 bn JPY)[0] so we’re not there yet.

On the format part, it’s interesting to see manga publishers adapting to smartphones and sometimes have two versions published: one vertically scrollable “decomposed” stream of the story, and a “recomposed” book format version sold as comic book in the traditional way. Line manga does that, and I’d expect a bunch more companies to have made the move.

All in all, good ideas spread fast in those spheres, and the article’s “The industry’s business model has hardly changed since the 1960s” tagline is I think misleading regarding the industry’s ability to adapt.

https://www.statista.com/topics/7559/manga-industry-in-japan...

> The size of the global webtoons market was meanwhile valued at $3.7bn—and projected to reach $56bn by 2030.

This is called wishful thinking. The research was ordered by webtoons producers.

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S08E11/289555.jpg?b64lines=SUYgVEh...

Hoping before I click that this is Disco Stu's "if these trends continue... ayyy" line.

edit: ayyy

These are incredibly agressive growth estimates, but many competitors in the manga/comics space are rushing to grab their proverbial pieces of pie - disclaimer: this is anecdotal from experience working in the field

Those growth estimates are assuming there is more pie.

We've seen this over and over again, from telenovelas to anime to k-drama - the pie is never that large.

How well does this work in practice? I'd imagine it works better for stuff like 4koma style where the panels have a consistent size/emphasis and stick rigidly inside the confines of the panel but what happens for big dramatic panels? Are they just avoided? Do they have parts of the overlapped panels duplicated? Do they need to produce an entirely different version of a panel for being a book page vs a scrolling format?

The best case I've seen is Clevatess [0].

With absolutely no internal knowledge, I assume the author cuts the panels in traditional book style and specifies colors and background etc., and from there basically two teams running in parallel, one producing the vertical stream from the digital assets, and the other executing on the panel format.

This makes the vertical stream very readable, well balance and optimized, with none of the clunky artifacts that appear on manga that have been 'converted' for mobile format.

Looking at how there's actually three (!) versions of the series released in parallel, I'd assume they're just throwing money where it matters to cover the most ground.

[0] https://manga.line.me/product/periodic?id=Z0000841

There's a lot of variation in how the vertical scrolling format is used. Some just use it as "one panel at a time" but with a worse UX, while others lean hard into the scrolling format with things like sprawling panels longer than the length of the screen meant to be read while scrolling, among other things.

(It's a bit like asking "how well does putting comics on pages work?" Different comics use the medium very differently.)

So, to be a jerk and not give an answer, I'm going to instead suggest picking up V1 of the official Solo Leveling translation. It's under $10, and you can do a side-by-side comparison.

It's also a great manhwa, and supporting the authors and English translations can't be a wrong thing to do. :)

https://books.apple.com/us/book/solo-leveling-vol-1-comic/id...

Isn't that in the other direction? Created for vertical and then later published on paper?

Yes, that's what I meant; sorry if I mucked it up. :)

> have two versions published

Solo Leveling (a Korean Manhwa) is doing exactly that with their ebook publishing - so it'd definitely an industry thing, not limited to any one country.

I'm not sure I like it, but if I want it as an ebook (at least in part to support the authors and keep getting manga/manhwa in the US), there's not a lot of choice either.

If you have never given a Korean webtoon a chance and are into video games / fantasy themed anime I recommend you give omniscient reader a chance.

https://m.webtoons.com/en/action/omniscient-reader/list?titl...

It’s become pretty popular with Korean American streamers on Twitch and has of course spread to the rest of us via listening to them talk about it. I quite enjoyed it and hope that a Korean animated scene pops up to match the Japanese Anime one because this would be a great anime.

I came across that one before but found it incredibly derivative and boring. The arbitrary rules apocalyptic story where MC has inside knowledge just get’s really repetitive after reading a few.

The MC is kept as bland as possible for wider appeal, but the supporting characters can’t both pick up the slack and constantly be killed off to keep tension. Worse if they actually keep up with the MC’s progression then what’s the point of his primary advantage. So after a while the story just kind of slows down or falls apart.

Anyway thoughts?

> stor[ies] where MC has inside knowledge just get’s really repetitive after reading a few.

Agreed. The series may start off fun or interesting but the novelty eventually wears off and you're left with a mediocre plot and generic characters. It's as if the creators have never once thought about how their series should end, their primary goal is to keep it going as long as possible.

To be honest it's rare for me to actually complete a series. I'm usually hooked after the first 3 chapters, then 10-30 chapters later and it looks like a literal carbon copy of another series. It's gotten to the point where I stock up chapters for months then I read from where I left off. If I can't remember the vast majority of the plot, then I drop it. No point wasting my time on a forgettable story

I liked it at the time due to its meta nature. Integrating suspension of disbelief as a core mechanic in its power system is very appealing for my unread ass. Reminds me of Pratchett's novels and how they handle the concept of "stories".

I'd like to have more fantastical stuff to read that can take me along the ride of the author's mindset and problems while they weave their story :) Recommendations are welcome.

https://archive.vn/aesfl

I have a tablet that I want to read webtoons on because I don't want to use a tiny phone screen, it's basically impossible. The spaces between the panels are way too big. So I basically never read webtoons and stick exclusively to manga... If anyone knows a service that "fixes" the webtoons for me that would be great.

A few of the more popular webtoons have now been reformatted for print (e.g. Villains are Destined to Die, Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion). Those have both physical and digital copies, and use the normal page size.

I wonder if this runs the risk of changing the medium enough that things sometimes don’t work as the creator intended. Like when Manga is fixed to be right to left for non-Japanese audiences, sometimes it breaks things.

In animation or anime, Japan is still the big player and is going to be for a long time. However, in live action, South Korea is easily has an upper hand. Movies like The Old Boy, Parasite, Train to Busan and show like Squid Game have an international appeal while rarely any live-action Japanese movie made that kind of impact.

In my experience, manga are more detailed which is what I'll take over colored but less detailed stuff any day. And the huge spaces between the panels makes manwha even worse. Only manwha I've enjoyed reading is https://www.webtoons.com/en/drama/the-sound-of-magic-annaras...

Is it same trend of turning long form content into bite size? Book into blog post into tweets. Documentary into [youtube] videos into tiktok.

Or is it just a format change from book into mobile? Genuine question from someone first time hearing the term webtoon.

It's definitely both. The episodic nature has some elements that go towards the first, since sometimes you need to "buy" the episodes, cliffhangers are encouraged, just like they are inside a modern fiction novel to keep the reader "hooked".

And the publication schedule is nothing new, episodic novels, comics, etc. have existed for a very long time. The time it takes to produce episodes, like comics chapters, is not to be underestimated, so there's also an economic pressure.

From my very limited experience it's just a format change.

Can someone link me a webtoon so I can see the difference? Googling wasn’t great.

Edit: Nevermind, found one with English translation.

https://m.webtoons.com/en/romance/truebeauty/spin-off-4/view...

Yes seems perfectly suited for mobile consumption.

This one doesn't even profit much of the vertical height, it looks like a regular paper page format adapted to a vertical screen.

These days, a lot of high quality webtoons profit a lot of the vertical screen and make drawing that would be hard to put on paper without cutting it:

https://www.webtoons.com/en/action/omniscient-reader/episode...

Solo Leveling. I'm mentioning it all over here, but it's a great example of the style, the artwork, and the stories (at least the OP MC ones). It also has official English ebooks coming out.

I find the manhwa format to be incredibly annoying because you have to scroll excessively thanks to the large gaps between panels.

Well IMO the worst thing about webtoon / manhwa format is double spread, where it's achieved naturally when reading the traditional book-type manga, while in webtoon (solo leveling) sometimes it's rotated +/-90deg.

Korean entertainment industry does well at exploiting what works. Korean webtoons are short, quick, updated frequently, accessible, easy to read on the phone, everyone has a mobile, and that is what is done. Not to mention that there is a culture of translating everything into English as quickly as possible in Korea.

In contrast, mangas are often bought in book form (which are less and less attractive as time goes on), cost more, less accessible, and have a lower update frequency. Japanese entertainment industry are slow and reluctant to translate things into English.

The value of manga is a bit less tangible, as they tend to be part of a larger entertainment strategy (along with toys, games, memorabilia).

The article compares a market of a printed product (which is declining, and that's true for virtually ALL printed material) to a market of a purely digital distribution method (which is massively increasing, and that's true for virtually ALL digitally distributed material).

It would be more honest to compare the digital manga market to the digital Korean webtoon market - but then you wouldn't be able to write a little-informed article putting one source of entertainment into decline as compared to another.

Haven't really thought about it in depth, but it's been pretty interesting to see this play out in the American online scans scene as well. From my perspective, Japanese manga was basically the 800 lb gorilla that we were all consuming. At some point in my college days, I think around 2014, this one webcomic called The Gamer came out and was pretty popular. That's the first big Korean webtoon that I recall blowing up in popularity in the online webcomics scene. Actually, I take it back. Tower of God was another popular one as well. I can't remember when that one came out, but I mentally omitted it because I fell off the wagon myself - thought the series moved too slow throughout each season. After those two was Solo Leveling, which really blew up. The premise for SL was pretty generic power fantasy but good enough to entertain on a weekly basis. What really sold it though was the art. Nowadays, if you're reading online scans, you just as likely to run into a Korean webcomic than a Japanese one. (I'm ignoring stuff like the Breaker because I'm pretty sure that started as a print series - the webtoon stuff is a new wave of comics designed specifically for its vertical format)

Recommendations: As someone mentioned earlier -

Peerless Dad

Administrator Kang Jin Lee (Same author as above - spin off series about one of the characters in the above comic)

Legend of the Northern Blade

Chronicles of the Heavenly Demon

Skeleton Soldier Couldn't Protect the Dungeon (I like it, but admit it's inconsistent. Also, author really likes to emphasize sexual violence against women early on - it's pretty grotty.)

Villain Unrivaled

Return of the Crazy Demon

Probably a lot of other series I like, but these are the ones from the top of my head that are generally pretty good.

Past Life Regressor is another one I just remembered - I wouldn't call it good, but it's more interesting than the typical action fare. Starts out with the most generic premise - fantasy earth where everyone has powers, and one guy lucks into being able to go back in time to do thing right the second time around. What makes this one interesting is that you'd expect this time reset to be about him doing the typical fantasy stuff where he becomes a super powered action hero because he knows everything that will happen beforehand. Instead, He uses his knowledge of the future to navigate the Asian financial crisis and enrich himself through day trading.

> Last year the manga print market shrank by 2.3% to ¥265bn ($1.9bn).

There was a massive paper shortage due to COVID combined with a big jump to digital.

I've had a hard time finding chapters of One Piece due to this - if you don't pre-order you're too late. Also the latest box set of 20 volumes is at this point still unobtainium :(

Advertising has a large part to play here as well:

https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/43985/webtoon-comics-pla...

And it's not just this one company: I don't read comics of any description (with the arguable exception of xkcd), but at one point my social media ads were saturated with borderline-NSFW spam for Korean porn comics. I was genuinely surprised the ads was allowed by the Google/Meta morality police, and after enough not interested/not appropriate reports it did stop as suddenly as it started. Or maybe they just ran out of ad budget?

South Korea has made cultural export part of their industrial policy. It's very different from Japan whose executives still don't care about non Japanese and was 100% organic until CR saw a chance to profit off the difference but that still doesn't campare to SK. In my opinion it cheapens the medium to an extent. Not sure if the US does this too or if hollywood success is mostly organic. Certainly anime had seen the most organic growth of a market until CR, funi, Netflix et al ruined it.

TBH, I think it's more like the SK government trying to bank on the unexpected popularity of Korean culture, to which the government itself had contributed little. Frequently the government actively got in the way: the director Bong Joon-Ho and actor Song Kang-Ho, of Parasite fame, had been both on the infamous "cultural blacklist" maintained by Park Geun-hye's conservative government, for being "leftist artists."

I agree that blatant money-grabbing attempts do cheapen the art from time to time, but you don't really need the government's help for that.

There were several regulations, such as designating webtoons as youth harmful media when Lee Myung-bak took office.

At that time, the artists held campaign NO CUT.

It seems SK has been in this game for a long time:

>In 1997-1998, South Korea was in the midst of a financial crisis. It required a substantial loan from the International Monetary Fund to restructure its debt and it left South Korea, at the time, with a tarnished national brand. Fearing a brain drain and an inability to attract top talent, a Ministry of Culture (alongside tourism and sport) was created, with a specific department responsible for developing locally made and owned pop music, along with film, fashion, dance and art. This coincided with the end of state censorship (in 1996) and the removal of a cultural embargo with Japan in 2000, which led to an upsurge in Japanese consumption of Korean culture, prompting a need to meet the demand of the new audience. Music, along with other forms of culture, was seen as a way to accelerate economic recovery, so policies to support cultural development and investment to support the making and marketing of music were made. This was not funding. This was an investment. By 2011, K-Pop was finding new audiences around the world, including a sell out showcase at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.[0]

From wikipedia:

>President Kim Dae Jung put forth industrial policies supporting entertainment with the same regard as traditional industrial sectors such as manufacturing. Investments were made in both infrastructure and technology to support K-Pop, including concert halls and visual effects technology. In addition, government regulation of karaoke bars favored K-Pop.[6]

>Since then, there has been a focus on developing soft power; the Ministry believes that by promoting Korean culture abroad, exports of other goods and services will also increase. As part of those efforts to move beyond developing a domestic industry and toward international success, the Ministry established an advisory committee and announced an international training school. Direct financial support of artists increased. In 2013, the Ministry allocated 319 billion won (US$280 million) for direct support of Hallyu (Korean Wave). Cultural exports increased at an annual rate of 10 percent as a result of these efforts.[7]

If this aspect is overstated, at the very least the SK industry itself has focused on foreign markets:

>During the late 90s, talent agencies began to market K-pop stars by implementing an idol business model used in J-pop,[91] where talents are selected and trained to appeal to a global audience through formal lessons or through residency programs.[2]

While K-pop is compared to J-pop here, note that the comparison is the idol system, not the foreign marketing, which did not happen in Japan to my knowledge.

Edit: perhaps I'm wrong, from my own link:

>Despite popular internet speculation on the Korean government's financial support for the promotion of K-Pop, there are no figures to substantiate the speculation. In 2013, of the $230 million allocated for Hallyu, there are itemized contributions to the promotion of the Korean language, culture and food but no known figures for allocations directly to K-Pop.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/shainshapiro/2021/07/06/want-pr...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Culture,_Sports_an...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-pop

Hmm, yeah, I think whoever wrote this glossed over details to get a nice narrative. Saying the "IMF crisis" (as it was called in Korea) tarnished national brand is a bit like saying 9/11 tarnished the reputation of US aviation safety. The crisis shook Korea to its core, companies were going belly-up left and right, white-collar "salarymen" became homeless, people killed themselves along with their own kids, and I can assure you, nobody was thinking about national brand. It was an economic apocalypse.

As someone who doesn’t follow this scene: what are “CR” and “funi” ?

Crunchyroll and Funimation, the first of which is an anime streaming service and the latter of which was originally a North American anime licensor/localizer turned streaming service.

They're now both owned by Sony and have been merged.

Crunchyroll and Funimation, two anime streaming and localization services. Think Netflix for anime.

I like Korean webtoons (Tower of God most recently) but… eh. There’s nothing like Berserk or One Piece but for webtoons. Not yet. Ganbatte, Korea!

A shout out to the art of metaphorical her - a great change from the pulp webtoons

https://m.webtoons.com/en/drama/metaphorical-her/list?title_...

Edit: also a nod to what seemed to be Stan lee's last venture, the webtoon backchannel - still the only webtoon I can think of that had some animations included.

https://m.webtoons.com/en/super-hero/backchannel/list?title_...

Anecdotally, the Korean webtoons tend to come out faster and have quite detailed color art. This is despite Japan's manga industry being famously shitty for the drawers. Wonder how they keep up the pace in Korea.

Manga requires quite a bit of work for the editing and layout(no source on hand, but I've heard that it's the bulk of the time investment), which results in very nice to read pages, but webtoons just skip over that.

Additionally, the standard for the amount of art/pagecount per release is deceptively much higher for manga, for better and for worse.

I always assumed it was more about cost to print. Manga is often colored, it's just usually only grey and black colors. Nice color printing does cost a lot more.

Webtoons are much shorter in pure content. There's TONS of padding.

Also, pretty sure they shorten the chapters on purpose to make it have faster release cycles.

Like have asian novels translated into English split the original into 3-5 parts. Then release multiple times a week or weekly.

Sure but you still have to draw the padding. It shouldn't magically make it less work.

Definitely makes it easier to find content tailored to your interests. Especially if your interests are fixed gear culture. https://www.webtoons.com/en/sports/wind-breaker/list?title_n...

(if anyone knows of any with a similar vibe, please link, think MASH/Cornfed/Lucas Brunelle)

i grew up on japanese mangas and animes.

that said, i wish south korean ideas win. excluding their k-pop frenzy. i don't check their webtoons often. but i am happy with their movies and some of their music.

why?

japanese animes and mangas have become one dimensional. high school boys and girls saving the world. the lack of imagination is outstanding. and if i was not attached to these shows, i would have canceled them eons ago. most of us would.

they suck now.

Yeah I feel the same way about food, all food is the same now. I eat at McDonald's every day and the menu barely ever changes, they only ever seem to offer variations of this meat between two pieces of bread concept.

Get outside of the top 20 and you’ll find innovation.

This is true of any entertainment medium.

Troupes and cliches have always been huge in Asian stuff. It's just the volume of content is higher, thus it feels more repedative.

But, this is true of all media really. Like the heroes journey, pixie girl (girl that comes outa nowhere and takes you on an adventure).

Korean dramas have a up down peak cycle, high highs that crashes into a low low and repeat.

Chinese has a lot of study study, work hard deal. Family drama or overly high amounts of social drama

Or Japanese with their Japanese world view onto everyone lens. Ie nice main character and acts holier than thou.

I rarely find anything that isn't in the genre of "Tensei" (Reincarnation) anymore except a few longstanding franchise, anime/manga with much hype (Demon Slayer), or something related to the voice actor. In the last case, I picked up Birdie Wing due to two big name VAs (Tōru Furuya and Shūichi Ikeda), and it doesn't disappoint me at all.

Funny that the stock photo is of a French translation of Dragonball Z, rather than the Japanese original.

The attractiveness of webtoons is that it can be read on the mobile phone screen without too much zooming in. Manga's format has to change because it is a pain to be read on the phone.

This is like saying "Novels have to change because they're a pain to read via Twitter". Or "Landscape painting has to change because it's boring to sit in a movie theatre and watch them on a slideshow". Let media play into their own strengths.

If they don't, they might continue losing market share. Not to mention, there's nothing sacrosanct about the current format that can't be changed. In fact, there's a growing trend of Twitter based manga coming out.

When artists start caring about 'market share' they stop being artists.

Any artist who makes a living on their art cares about market share- at least to the extent that they have to go back to having a day job if the market share gets low enough.

Incorrect. They have to go back to their day job if their sales get low enough. If selling 1,000 units a year in a market of 10,000 units a year is enough, they don't suddenly starve if the market expands around them but they don't and now they're selling 1,000 units a year in a market of 100,000.

I see your point and you are both correct and incorrect. It's true that an indie artist who needs to sell, say, 5,000 comics a year doesn't have to care about market share as long as they can support themselves with the sales of 5,000 comics.

But it's also true that if you are the lowest rated comic published by Disney, you'll probably be cancelled regardless of gross sales numbers. If all the other books start outselling you, Disney probably won't consider staying in business with you worth their time.

And if you are fired by Disney, you may find yourself in need of a day job.

What if the market share shrinks from 100k to 90k and they're only selling 900 units now? And what if drawing manga is their day job?

Doesn't this just prove my point? The market share is unchanged in that scenario.

When artists stop caring about market share, they stop being artists.

For the last 10 years, I've been reading manga off a tablet. Recently, my tablet died and for next couple of months I had no way to purchase a replacement, so I decided to give it a go on a phone. Honestly, I did not expect things to turn out so well: landscape orientation, fit to width and pinch zoom do the job most of the time. The only issue I have is with split spread pages, but that's more of the reader and source integration issue - I suspect Mangaplus doesn't annotate pages as spreads like Crunchyroll, so Tachiyomi has no way of knowing what's a spread.

I have only a vague awareness of manga, but I feel like all of the famous ones are men whereas this article features several female authors. Is that noteworthy?

No because there is several famous female manga authors. Rumiko Takahashi is probably the biggest one, did Inuyasha and Ranma 1/2 among others, then you got Hiromu Arakawa who did Fullmetal Alchemist, and Naoko Takeuchi who created Sailor Moon, CLAMP the female team behind Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits and others. I'm sure there's a lot more in the Josei side of things I don't read too much and aren't as popular in the West too.

Sailor Moon, Inuyasha, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Full Metal Alchemist were all female authors — and animes you could watch on US tv.

I think manga still has a much greater cultural foothold than webtoons

Also I read that 80% of Japanese adults read manga, so it will continue to exist even if it shrinks

highly recommend new readers check out ‘The Beginning After The End’ or ‘Solo Leveling’

Any of the webtoons got anything similar to Fist of the Northstar?

Soon DALL-e will eclipse them both.

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