> 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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
> 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.
Readit News
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...
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.
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.
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!
Wait, what? Who?
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.
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.
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.
No, they just report on that. They report on money-related things. Doesn't mean they don't understand other things.
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?
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...
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".
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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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
That said, I still read the stuff on occasion. It's still comics, and not far in the adherence to formula.
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.
The stuff you name is stuff aimed at young men or boys. But there is more to it then just that.
Caveat emptor: I’ve worked on both manhwa and manga as a scanlation (unofficial translations) proofreader.
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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.
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.
Ultimately, it's all in line with the rise of South Korea. 1980s : Japan :: 2010s : S. Korea
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.
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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
This is called wishful thinking. The research was ordered by webtoons producers.
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
(It's a bit like asking "how well does putting comics on pages work?" Different comics use the medium very differently.)
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...
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.
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.
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?
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'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.