Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons

Lee hyun-seok grew up in South Korea addicted to Japanese manga series such as “Dragon Ball” and “Slam Dunk”. As soon as he could, he emigrated to Tokyo to build a successful career as a manga artist and editor. Then in the early 2000s came “webtoons”, a South Korean cartoon innovation optimised for smartphones. Mr Lee was at first unimpressed. Compared with manga’s inventive graphic styles and sophisticated plots, he found webtoons crude and superficial. “I thought: ‘Anybody can make this’.”

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 are gravitating to digital slowly, in part because they are still designed for print, so awkward to read on smartphones. The letters tend to be too small and the way the panels are laid out requires constant zooming in and out. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, Mr Lee abandoned manga for the webtoon industry in 2014.