When the internet first arrived in South Korea in the late 1990s, it found a country reeling from the Asian financial crisis, a collapsed traditional publishing industry, and a generation of young artists who had spent their formative years reading Japanese manga — officially banned or restricted by the government until 1998 — in underground markets and photocopied bootlegs. What happened next was one of the most consequential accidents in comics history: broke creators posted their work for free online, readers responded with enough enthusiasm that portals paid to host more, and within a decade Korea had invented a new comics format that would eventually challenge manga's global dominance. The format was called webtoon, and it was designed, without knowing it, for the smartphone age.
A History Written Under Censorship
Korean manhwa (만화, pronounced "man-hwa") has its origins in the political cartoon tradition of the Japanese colonial period. The first recognised manhwa artist, Lee Do-yeong, published political satires in Korean newspapers in the 1900s under Japanese occupation, a tradition that required considerable courage given the censorship regime. After independence in 1945 and the Korean War (1950–1953), manhwa developed rapidly as cheap entertainment for a population with limited income and limited entertainment options — lending shops (daeyeoseo) rented manhwa by the hour, and popular series attracted queues.
But Korean comics history is haunted by censorship in a way that Japanese manga's is not. The Park Chung-hee military government, which seized power in 1961 and ruled until 1979, subjected manhwa to systematic review and banning, targeting "harmful" content with enough aggression that the entire medium was commercially suppressed. Japanese manga, which occupied the cultural space Korean manhwa might have dominated, was simultaneously banned on anti-Japanese nationalist grounds — a ban that was widely violated through bootleg reprints but officially maintained until 1998. This double censorship produced a manhwa industry that was both technically skilled (creators had been drawing for decades) and commercially fragile (the industry had no reliable business model).
The 1997 Crisis as Creative Catalyst
The 1997 Asian financial crisis devastated South Korea's economy and, with it, what remained of the traditional manhwa publishing industry. Print publishers collapsed. Newsstand distribution networks evaporated. Artists who had been producing for established publishers suddenly had no market.
Some of them turned to the internet, which South Korea was then wiring with remarkable speed — by 2002 South Korea had the highest broadband penetration rate of any country on earth. Artists posted their work on personal homepages, on fan communities, on the early portal sites like Daum and Naver. They had no revenue model; they posted because it was the only way to reach readers. Readers responded with passionate enthusiasm. Portal sites, watching the traffic, began to understand that original comic content was a powerful audience-builder, and began paying creators to produce exclusive content. The webtoon format — infinite-scroll vertical strips optimised for reading on computer monitors, then on phones — emerged not from a design brief but from the practical reality of web layout.
Naver, Daum, and the Platform Model
In 2004, South Korea's two largest internet portals — Naver and Daum — both launched official webtoon sections with creator payment. Crucially, they made the content free to readers, monetising through advertising and using comics as a driver of portal engagement. This free-access model, combined with Korean broadband ubiquity, produced audience scale that no traditional manhwa publisher had ever achieved. Hits like Tower of God by SIU and Noblesse accumulated readerships in the tens of millions on a single platform, numbers that dwarfed any print manhwa series.
The global expansion came in 2014 when LINE Webtoon launched English, Chinese, Spanish, and Thai versions, with a creator programme allowing international artists to post work and share in advertising revenue. The platform was betting that the webtoon format — free, mobile-optimised, updated weekly, with an infinite scroll that eliminated the page-break conventions of print comics — was portable across cultures. The bet paid off enormously. By 2021 Webtoon had 82 million monthly active users and was valued at $2.7 billion.
Solo Leveling and the Anime Crossover
Solo Leveling by Chugong (with art by Dubu / REDICE Studio) is the defining manhwa of the 2020s and the clearest demonstration of the medium's global mainstream arrival. Beginning as a web novel on KakaoPage in 2016 and adapted into manhwa in 2018, it follows a hunter — a combatant who explores dungeons in a world where gates to monster-filled dimensions have opened across Earth — who begins as the world's weakest and rises, through a singular ability to "level up," to become the strongest. The power fantasy is clean, the art spectacularly detailed, and the pacing relentless.
By 2023, Solo Leveling had accumulated over 14 billion views on KakaoPage alone and sold millions of physical volumes across Asia. Its 2024 anime adaptation by A-1 Pictures — the first major Korean manhwa to receive a Japanese anime production — debuted at the top of global streaming charts on Crunchyroll, completing a full-circle cultural exchange: Korean comics, developed partly in response to Japanese manga's influence, now having its work adapted by Japanese animation studios for a global audience.
The Webtoon Format: Scroll, Colour, and the Phone as Medium
What makes webtoon distinct from both manga and Western comics is its total adaptation to mobile reading. Manga was designed for the page and remains page-bound; its rhythm, its use of negative space, its panel grid — all assume a reader holding a book. Webtoons scroll vertically, infinitely, with no page breaks. This eliminates the page-turn as a dramatic device (one of manga's most powerful tools) but creates a different rhythm: the reader's thumb controls the pace, and creators design "screen breaks" — moments of empty space — to control when the next revelation arrives in the scroll.
Webtoons are also produced in full colour as a default, where manga is almost always black-and-white. The colour production is designed for screen, not print, which means it uses digital colouring techniques very different from print comic colouring — flat colours, strong outlines, cinematic lighting effects. When a webtoon is printed in physical volumes (as popular series often are), the colour production rarely translates as well as the original screen format. The phone is not just a delivery mechanism; it is, for the best webtoon artists, the intended canvas.