SEOUL, Jan. 18 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s webtoon industry experienced its fifth consecutive year of sales growth in 2022, but creators faced a decline in their incomes due to increased competition, a government report showed Thursday. According to an annual report from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the industry logged 1.829 trillion [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 2 (Korea Bizwire) —In a world where cultural boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred, Korean webtoons are making waves across the globe, captivating readers from the United States, Japan, Europe, and beyond. The once surprising trend of Korean webtoons being serialized on foreign platforms is now commonplace, with instances of “reverse imports” bringing American [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 13 (Korea Bizwire) – Religion and webtoons form an unusual pairing. Traditionally, religion is associated with solemnity and reverence, while webtoons are known for their light and humorous nature. However, in recent times, an increasing number of webtoons have ventured beyond merely borrowing the concepts of religious values, delving directly into religious doctrines, gods, [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 8 (Korea Bizwire) – Dramas based on popular webtoons have taken center stage in the South Korean TV drama market. In a country where novelty is key, these adaptations draw viewers with their fresh settings, imaginative characters, and recognizable titles. One of the most buzzed-about webtoon-based dramas in the latter half of this year [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 5 (Korea Bizwire) – A group of inmates has achieved success by winning various open competitions after acquiring webtoon production techniques through a prison vocational training program. This accomplishment followed the Ministry of Justice’s focused efforts to provide intensive education on technology related to the modern age of cultural content, aiming to ensure the [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 4 (Korea Bizwire) – Among the recent popular dramas, from ‘Moving’ to ‘Mask Girl,’ it’s difficult to find ones that are not based on webtoons. The term ‘webtoon original’ has become so common that jokes are being made, suggesting the need for a specific term like ‘drama original.’ Against this backdrop, a recent study [...]
SEOUL, July 14 (Korea Bizwire) — The Character Licensing Fair 2023, South Korea’s largest fair for the character industry, took place at COEX in southern Seoul on Thursday. For the first time ever, a webtoon booth was set up at the fair. The booth, measuring 7 meters in width and 4 meters in height, resembled [...]
SEOUL, July 12 (Korea Bizwire) — Visual storytelling skills are essential to become a professional webtoon artist, but advancing artificial intelligence (AI) technology is now capable of creating images and text, and challenging the industry in a fundamental way. Webtoons, a type of digital comics read on smartphones, tablets and PCs, have emerged as a [...]
SEOUL, June 1 (Korea Bizwire) — Amidst controversy surrounding Naver Webtoon’s recent utilization of artificially intelligence (AI)-generated works, its main competitor is garnering attention by hosting a contest that appears to be mindful of this issue. Kakao Webtoon Studio announced that it will a guerrilla contest for six days starting Thursday. The contest explicitly states [...]
SEOUL, May 26 (Korea Bizwire) — “The Hellbound,” the original Korean webtoon on which a popular 2021 Netflix series was adapted from, has been nominated for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, one of the most prestigious awards in the comics industry. “The Hellbound vols 1-2″ by Yeon Sang-ho and Choi Gyu-seok, translated into English [...]