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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.