Move over, Spidey and Superman: are ‘webtoons’ the future of storytelling?

A new medium of visual storytelling is quietly taking the world by storm. They’ve been spotted on huge billboards in New York, and in major exhibitions at the V&A in London. They’ve taken the top spots on mobile phone app download charts, become bestsellers in print, and are lighting up screens all over the world through blockbuster film and TV adaptations. 

They’re called webtoons, and following an explosive popularity growth in recent years, one leading provider, Naver Webtoon, boasts over 76 million monthly users and claims to be “the largest digital publisher in the world”. But what exactly is this Korean innovation – and is it really the future of visual entertainment?

Webtoons had an unlikely trajectory to success. At the dawn of the new millennium, manhwa (Korean printed comics) had been widely blamed for the rise of sex, bullying and violence in Korean schools in the 1990s. By 1997, the government responded by passing new legislation to restrict the publication and distribution of manhwa, while confiscated comics were burned en masse once a year in front of Seoul City Hall — in images that were broadcast nationwide by the media. 

That same year, the Asian Financial Crisis brought the peninsula to its knees — prompting new economic strategies that led to significant investments in high-speed internet technology (and, ultimately, the mass exportation of new forms of pop culture such as K-Pop and Korean cinema). With the virtual extinction of manhwa at the new millennium, artists were driven to the internet to work around the issue. The result was a new online entertainment medium: webtoons.

These digital cartoons and graphic novels – formatted vertically, and read by scrolling downwards on a web browser or mobile phone – have evolved into a highly lucrative industry. Thanks to rapid growth during the pandemic, webtoons’ combined sales topped 1 trillion won (£684.6 million) in 2020 — with over 2,617 new series published that year alone. 

Like Spotify and Netflix, accessibility has been key to webtoons’ breakout success. And thanks to leading apps owned by Korean corporations Kakao and Naver (“the Google of South Korea”), which can be downloaded by anyone with a mobile phone, these bitesize creations can be consumed practically everywhere. Revenue is driven by users who sign up for early access to new episodes, and by advertising — but the media is otherwise free for the common reader. 

Meanwhile, a high turnover of new material (most series publish new episodes weekly) ensures that webtoon consumption is firmly in step with a culture stoked by popular social media sites like TikTok and Snapchat. Webtoons provide quick and regular sensory thrills that instantly satisfy low attention spans. 

They’re more than just online comic books, though. Music and animations often enhance the user experience, with the horror genre a prime example of their effectiveness. Take the Bongcheon-Dong Ghost story – a viral smash in the West in 2011, thanks in part to the influence of popular YouTuber PewDiePie, an early champion of the series. 

The webtoon follows a young woman who notices a strange figure as she walks the streets at night, and it includes 3D-like illustrations, startling sound effects and fully-animated jump scares as the reader scrolls. Other horror works, like 2016 webtoon Phone Ghost, have utilised AR (augmented reality) technology – activating phone cameras at strategic moments to bring scares to life, as well as using vibrations and real-life phone calls to amplify the experience. 

These are a small microcosm of what is arguably the industry’s greatest asset: an impressive breadth of unique stories being told. Just as Spotify boasts an arsenal of independent and mainstream music from all countries of the world, webtoon platforms offer a vault of diverse storytelling in myriad art styles, languages, perspectives and genres – including comedy, sci-fi, superhero and romance. Popular subjects with the predominantly younger audiences (over 70 per cent of Naver Webtoon users are under 24) include high school bullying, mental health and LGBTQ issues. The industry has also successfully captured the minds of female readers – more than half of the 82 million monthly users of Naver Webtoon are female.

The most popular webtoons on the planet exemplify this broad appeal. Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus combines romance and Greek mythology with contemporary technology, and is told using bright colours in a watercolour art style. The series has 1.1 billion views and 5.9 million subscribers on Naver’s platform. True Beauty (928 million views), meanwhile, concerns a bullied high schooler who dreams of becoming a beauty influencer. Down to Earth (310 million views), on the other hand, concerns an alien girl who crash lands in a young human male’s back garden.

There are now more than 14,000 webtoons by 9,900 creators in South Korea alone, while on an international scale, everyone from 36-year-old New Zealand graphic design graduate Rachel Smythe (Lore Olympus) to 28-year-old San Diego native Kaitlyn Narvaza (Siren’s Lament, 437 million views) and 31-year-old single mother Kim Na-young (True Beauty) have got in on the act. Crucially, these creators retain copyright over their works – and, for the most successful, it can be a lucrative business. 

In September 2021, the top webtoon creator made £7.6 million in 2019 aflone; and the site’s founder, Junkoo Kim, claimed some Korean creators were making the equivalent of £175,000 to £195,000 per year. Those figures come with a gruelling weekly work schedule (Smythe, for example, reported a 70-hour working week in 2021), and indeed, for most creators, remuneration is much more modest – average annual revenue for individuals is 48.4m won (£30,500). The Naver Webtoon platform’s ad revenue sharing program, meanwhile, only begins at 1,000 subscribers and 40,000 global monthly page views for a series.

Instead, the biggest opportunity for webtoon creators in 2022 seems to be in the world of TV and film. Feature film productions, such as 2015 political crime drama Inside Men and 2017 fantasy Along with the Gods, both adapted from webtoons, have been huge financial successes in Korea. The former sold 9.1 million tickets at the Korean box office, becoming the country’s top-grossing R-rated movie of all-time in the process. The latter, which features Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae and Ma Dong-seok of Marvel’s Eternals among the cast, remains the third-highest grossing film in South Korean cinema history. 

But their influence stretches far beyond the peninsula. HBO Max and Apple TV+ are adapting webtoons to success all over the world. The latter launched their platform in Korea with Dr Brain in November 2021, a webtoon-adapted science fiction crime series starring Parasite actor Lee Sun-kyun. The notorious Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike (Audition) is adapting the Shin Dae-Sung webtoon Connect – about a man kidnapped by organ hunters who loses an eye – for a Disney+ thriller series in 2023.

Netflix, meanwhile, has seen a string of global hits via their own Korean webtoon adaptations, including 2022 high school zombie apocalypse series All Of Us Are Dead, which had over 474.26 million hours of streaming in its first 17 days on the service. It became the second-most searched Korean drama in the world behind Squid Game, with fellow webtoon adaptations like True Beauty, Business Proposal, Itaewon Class and Hellbound (which toppled Squid Game from the top of Netflix’s viewership charts in 80 countries within a day of release in November 2021) also dominating the top 10.  

So far, there are fewer English-language film and television adaptations – but that could soon change, especially as the format grows internationally. Naver Webtoon launched a new European corporation in 2022, while major publishers like Marvel, Archie Comics and DC Comics have turned to webtoons as a new avenue of storytelling via series like Eternals: The 500-Year War, Big Ethel Energy, and the Batman-oriented Wayne Family Adventures. The latter has already published 53 volumes. In turn, the Jim Henson Company – of The Muppets and Fraggle Rock fame – is adapting Lore Olympus as an animated series.

So are Webtoons here to stay? It certainly looks like it. Lore Olympus became a New York Times bestseller as a printed graphic novel (you can find it on the shelves in Waterstones in the UK), while in 2019 K-Pop superstars BTS lit up Times Square’s digital billboards in webtoon form. Don’t be surprised if tomorrow’s leading filmmakers turn to digital comics for inspiration rather than the dusty pages of Superman and Spidey.