Korea’s traditional comic industry has lost its position since 1997 – 1998 when the Asian financial crisis dragged many publishers into bankruptcy. But the Internet has opened a new path.
The history of webtoon started 10 years ago when cartoonist Kang Full decided to upload his work on his personal blog in 2002. After that, the site searched popularly in Korea, like Naver, Daum also embarked on designing an online comic introduction website, helping young artists with playgrounds to show their personality and talents. Unexpectedly, these works are welcomed by many people. Kang’s “Love Story” attracted 2 million views in just one day after its online release in 2003
Japan is proud to be the cradle of the popular manga series. However, fierce competition from foreign rivals is pushing manga to the crossroads: continuing to be faithful to traditional print stories, or updating the online comics trend (webtoon).
Webtoon is Korea’s long-running comic book, not published in the usual way. Webtoon often has content not too lengthy, diverse drawings, colored, new storytelling and hidden in it many profound lessons. This is also the reason why webtoon is one of the interesting choices for readers.
For example: “What is Kim’s secretary?” Is a hot movie recently and adapted from the famous webtoon “What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim?”
Japan, South Korea, and China are now named as the 3 biggest forces in the Asian comics village with the boom in size and quality of the comic industry. Although not comparable to Japan, the country has always been at the forefront of this field, but the Korean comics industry still gains much attention from international readers.
Especially, Webtoon comics genre is also being developed strongly and seems to have become a big brand to help Korean comics village reach the world. Today, let’s take a look at some of the features of the comic genre that are still quite unfamiliar to some readers.
First of all, some comments have suggested that Webtoon is a crossbreed between comics and cartoons. At first, Webtoon was just some pictures drawn and shared by amateur artists on the Internet. Sometime later, this movement developed a little more, these images can be added and moved along with some sounds to create a more authentic feel for viewers. Because of these characteristics, when reading a Webtoon comic, readers will feel like they are watching a real animation.
Webtoon comics are always colored and processed by computers, but rarely follow traditional drawing style like Japanese. In addition, the number of frames and details in the story are also extremely small, a story page usually has only 1-2 frames, not a clear framing like in Japanese Manga sets.
Because the number of frames is so small, when reading stories, readers often have to scroll quickly from top to bottom, constantly monitoring the frames to ensure the story and not be bored. Because of this feature, the story of Webtoon is often slower and much less than Japanese Manga. Normally, it takes 3 to 4 chapters of a Webtoon story to describe the content equivalent to a chapter of a regular Manga.
Due to the differences from traditional Manga, in the first reading, readers will definitely feel extremely strange to this genre. However, once you get used to Webtoon, you will feel that these “freaky” framed comic books are “as addictive” as compared to the traditional popular manga.
Famous webtoon comics like Girls of the Wild’s, Dr. Frost, Orange Marmalade or Noblesse really give a deep impression to readers. The explosion of mobile era and technology allows readers to read anywhere from the plane, supermarket, gym or subway. It really delivers a huge audience and creates a rich market for story-writing studios.
It has created a new industry where painters or anyone who loves comic books can compose and make money from their work. In addition to paid sites, free reading sites are really booming. With a large audience, comics are composed and updated weekly. This is really an attractive industry. Among the free comic reading websites. Manytoon.com has a high number of loyal readers.
Readers are willing to pay monthly fees for websites that offer good webtoon comics. Besides, websites for reading free comics also flourish. Manytoon.com is a site like that. Manytoon.com allows readers to read hundreds of comics for free. The site offers paid stories based on community funding. The website updates webtoon daily and has 300 top quality comics. If you want to read comics online free, surely manytoon will not disappoint you.
