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The success of online comics or "webtoons", as the South Koreans call them, continues to grow. The Korean publishers are now displaying global ambitions and are embarking on a great race to develop content that then declines in all forms.
Comic books designed to be read on the screen of a smartphone, webtoons are read from top to bottom, scrolling images with the thumb . Their success is spectacular. In the subway, readers of all ages are bent over their screen to devour the last episode of their favorite series.
In South Korea, drawing first for paper is now an exception . The two main webtoon publishers are Naver, the leading Korean search engine, and Kakao, a successful email. Naver is 1,600 professional cartoonists, hundreds of thousands of amateur authors , and an app that has 60 million monthly readers around the world.
The search engine announced new investments, while the global webtoons market was estimated at $ 1 billion in 2018 . " We want to become a multinational entertainment company like Disney, " said boss Kim Joon-koo .
How does he intend to do it? By creating even more original content while searching for new artists. For example, the publisher organized a series of competitions this year .
Boom adaptations to cinema and television
In fact, if these comics are sold, episode by episode, to the readers, most of the income comes mainly from derivative products and adaptations to cinema and television.
Some TV series adapted from webtoon are extremely popular. Netflix, for example, has just announced the production of a series inspired by an online comic, entitled L'alarme d'amour .
In the dark rooms, the recent With the Gods, taken from a webtoon , has become the third most viewed film of Korean cinema. As for the national sector of the video game, in difficulty, it tries to revive by adapting in the form of games the most popular webtoons .
International Strategy
Korean Korean webtoon publishers now have an international strategy. They translate and adapt their comics in all languages. Successful: Naver says its app is at the top of Google Playstore's " BD " category in more than 100 countries. In the United States, the number of readers has increased by 70% in two years.
The webtoons are also very successful in neighboring Japan, where they are carefully modified to erase their Korean origins, so as not to alienate the most nationalist readers.
This success in Japan is such that it causes a challenge to the world of traditional publishing on paper, which suffers from a decline in sales .
A Japanese daily also sees in this spectacular success a " revenge " of the South Koreans , who have adopted some of the codes of the Japanese manga, to adapt them to an online format that is now in progress.