Its global brand Line Webtoon provides the same program.
Currently, 80 percent of the artists at Naver Webtoon were discovered through Challenge League. The artists who qualify can win slots on the portal to publish work regularly.
The company explains that its main driving engine so far is an online program called Challenge League, which amateur and professional cartoonists can upload their work to and receive feedback from readers.
The giant search engine, which already owns a large number of good-quality webtoons, decided to translate those into three languages - English, Chinese and Taiwanese - as well as present the work of foreign cartoonists on the site. Last July, Naver launched its global Internet comic service, Line Webtoon. “Collaborating with a world-famous content provider was a new challenge by itself and it will be a stepping-stone for domestic artists to advance onto a global stage,” said Park Jeong-seo, an official from the webtoon service department at DaumKakao. The company will have to wait and see whether the collaboration is a success or not, but the cooperation itself is meaningful. Responding to the increasing international demand for webtoons, DaumKakao recently joined hands with Marvel Entertainment to publish “Avengers: Electric Rain,” which reflects Marvel’s superhero stories but is drawn in a Korean style by cartoonist Ko Young-hoon. Non-Korean readers say that seeing one panel at a time instead of a whole page is an especially appealing concept. Going global Webtoons mainly differ from original comic books in the way they are formatted for reading online - from flipping through pages to scrolling up and down. This period of adaptations defined the first heyday of webtoons, but the industry’s pinnacle is yet to come.
One of the best examples is Kang’s “Late Blossom,” which was adapted into a film, play and TV drama.
The webtoon surge in the film market reached its peak in 2013 when “Secretly, Greatly,” based on Hun’s Internet comic of the same title, recorded seven million viewers and achieved an unexpected box-office hit.Īlong with the movie business, TV dramas, plays and other byproducts of the market have benefitted from using webtoons’ content and characters.
But their financial potential came to light in 2006 when Kang Full’s “Apartment” became the first online comic to be adapted into a movie. Its rival Naver jumped on the bandwagon in 2005, launching its own service under the name Naver Webtoon.Īt the time, webtoons were not made with profit in mind, so the content was provided for free. The origin of the webtoon goes back to 2003 when major Korean search engine Daum (now DaumKakao) decided to serially publish the work of celebrity cartoonists Yoon Tae-ho and Kang Full. During the first World Webtoon Forum held last year, Didier Borg, the CEO of French online comic website Delitoon, even announced that “webtoons will replace manga.”
Īs recently as five years ago, webtoons - the Korean term for cartoon series published on the Internet - only appealed to a limited number of people who were open to consuming comics online.īut the recent webtoon boom in the country shows this is no longer the case, with experts saying that Korean net cartoons are sure to become bigger hits worldwide. 1.Korean company DaumKakao collaborated with U.S-based entertainment titan Marvel for its webtoon series “Avengers: Electric Rain,” drawn by Korean artist Ko Young-hoon 2.“The Sound of Your Heart,” by Cho Seok, is distributed in English on Naver’s global webtoon service “Line Webtoon.” 3.Jeho Son and Kwangsu Lee’s “Noblesse” was translated into English, Japanese and more for overseas fans.4.Korean game company NCSoft publishes celebrity cartoonist Yoon Tae-ho’s “Mysterious Planning Office” on the company blog.