> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
I have a tablet that I want to read webtoons on because I don't want to use a tiny phone screen, it's basically impossible. The spaces between the panels are way too big. So I basically never read webtoons and stick exclusively to manga... If anyone knows a service that "fixes" the webtoons for me that would be great.
A few of the more popular webtoons have now been reformatted for print (e.g. Villains are Destined to Die, Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion). Those have both physical and digital copies, and use the normal page size.
I wonder if this runs the risk of changing the medium enough that things sometimes don’t work as the creator intended. Like when Manga is fixed to be right to left for non-Japanese audiences, sometimes it breaks things.
In animation or anime, Japan is still the big player and is going to be for a long time. However, in live action, South Korea is easily has an upper hand. Movies like The Old Boy, Parasite, Train to Busan and show like Squid Game have an international appeal while rarely any live-action Japanese movie made that kind of impact.
In my experience, manga are more detailed which is what I'll take over colored but less detailed stuff any day. And the huge spaces between the panels makes manwha even worse.
Only manwha I've enjoyed reading is
https://www.webtoons.com/en/drama/the-sound-of-magic-annaras...
It's definitely both. The episodic nature has some elements that go towards the first, since sometimes you need to "buy" the episodes, cliffhangers are encouraged, just like they are inside a modern fiction novel to keep the reader "hooked".
And the publication schedule is nothing new, episodic novels, comics, etc. have existed for a very long time. The time it takes to produce episodes, like comics chapters, is not to be underestimated, so there's also an economic pressure.
Solo Leveling. I'm mentioning it all over here, but it's a great example of the style, the artwork, and the stories (at least the OP MC ones). It also has official English ebooks coming out.
Well IMO the worst thing about webtoon / manhwa format is double spread, where it's achieved naturally when reading the traditional book-type manga, while in webtoon (solo leveling) sometimes it's rotated +/-90deg.
Korean entertainment industry does well at exploiting what works. Korean webtoons are short, quick, updated frequently, accessible, easy to read on the phone, everyone has a mobile, and that is what is done. Not to mention that there is a culture of translating everything into English as quickly as possible in Korea.
In contrast, mangas are often bought in book form (which are less and less attractive as time goes on), cost more, less accessible, and have a lower update frequency. Japanese entertainment industry are slow and reluctant to translate things into English.
The value of manga is a bit less tangible, as they tend to be part of a larger entertainment strategy (along with toys, games, memorabilia).
The article compares a market of a printed product (which is declining, and that's true for virtually ALL printed material) to a market of a purely digital distribution method (which is massively increasing, and that's true for virtually ALL digitally distributed material).
It would be more honest to compare the digital manga market to the digital Korean webtoon market - but then you wouldn't be able to write a little-informed article putting one source of entertainment into decline as compared to another.
Haven't really thought about it in depth, but it's been pretty interesting to see this play out in the American online scans scene as well. From my perspective, Japanese manga was basically the 800 lb gorilla that we were all consuming. At some point in my college days, I think around 2014, this one webcomic called The Gamer came out and was pretty popular. That's the first big Korean webtoon that I recall blowing up in popularity in the online webcomics scene. Actually, I take it back. Tower of God was another popular one as well. I can't remember when that one came out, but I mentally omitted it because I fell off the wagon myself - thought the series moved too slow throughout each season. After those two was Solo Leveling, which really blew up. The premise for SL was pretty generic power fantasy but good enough to entertain on a weekly basis. What really sold it though was the art. Nowadays, if you're reading online scans, you just as likely to run into a Korean webcomic than a Japanese one. (I'm ignoring stuff like the Breaker because I'm pretty sure that started as a print series - the webtoon stuff is a new wave of comics designed specifically for its vertical format)
Recommendations: As someone mentioned earlier -
Peerless Dad
Administrator Kang Jin Lee (Same author as above - spin off
series about one of the characters in the above comic)
Legend of the Northern Blade
Chronicles of the Heavenly Demon
Skeleton Soldier Couldn't Protect the Dungeon (I like it, but admit it's inconsistent. Also, author really likes to emphasize sexual violence against women early on - it's pretty grotty.)
Villain Unrivaled
Return of the Crazy Demon
Probably a lot of other series I like, but these are the ones from the top of my head that are generally pretty good.
Past Life Regressor is another one I just remembered - I wouldn't call it good, but it's more interesting than the typical action fare. Starts out with the most generic premise - fantasy earth where everyone has powers, and one guy lucks into being able to go back in time to do thing right the second time around. What makes this one interesting is that you'd expect this time reset to be about him doing the typical fantasy stuff where he becomes a super powered action hero because he knows everything that will happen beforehand. Instead, He uses his knowledge of the future to navigate the Asian financial crisis and enrich himself through day trading.
> Last year the manga print market shrank by 2.3% to ¥265bn ($1.9bn).
There was a massive paper shortage due to COVID combined with a big jump to digital.
I've had a hard time finding chapters of One Piece due to this - if you don't pre-order you're too late. Also the latest box set of 20 volumes is at this point still unobtainium :(
And it's not just this one company: I don't read comics of any description (with the arguable exception of xkcd), but at one point my social media ads were saturated with borderline-NSFW spam for Korean porn comics. I was genuinely surprised the ads was allowed by the Google/Meta morality police, and after enough not interested/not appropriate reports it did stop as suddenly as it started. Or maybe they just ran out of ad budget?
South Korea has made cultural export part of their industrial policy. It's very different from Japan whose executives still don't care about non Japanese and was 100% organic until CR saw a chance to profit off the difference but that still doesn't campare to SK. In my opinion it cheapens the medium to an extent. Not sure if the US does this too or if hollywood success is mostly organic. Certainly anime had seen the most organic growth of a market until CR, funi, Netflix et al ruined it.
[+] [-] screye|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mftb|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djtango|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] bnjms|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|3 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] tromp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwqrwqqrw|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chocolatkey|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] politelemon|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ravel-bar-foo|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] magnio|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] bluepizza|3 years ago|reply
This is called wishful thinking. The research was ordered by webtoons producers.
[+] [-] Macha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] the_lonely_road|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Retric|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lidavidm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FuturisticLover|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PixelForg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_c|3 years ago|reply
Or is it just a format change from book into mobile? Genuine question from someone first time hearing the term webtoon.
[+] [-] Aissen|3 years ago|reply
And the publication schedule is nothing new, episodic novels, comics, etc. have existed for a very long time. The time it takes to produce episodes, like comics chapters, is not to be underestimated, so there's also an economic pressure.
[+] [-] b4je7d7wb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mistletoe|3 years ago|reply
Edit: Nevermind, found one with English translation.
https://m.webtoons.com/en/romance/truebeauty/spin-off-4/view...
Yes seems perfectly suited for mobile consumption.
[+] [-] Kuinox|3 years ago|reply
These days, a lot of high quality webtoons profit a lot of the vertical screen and make drawing that would be hard to put on paper without cutting it:
https://www.webtoons.com/en/action/omniscient-reader/episode...
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] falcolas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hisyam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fendy3002|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deafpolygon|3 years ago|reply
In contrast, mangas are often bought in book form (which are less and less attractive as time goes on), cost more, less accessible, and have a lower update frequency. Japanese entertainment industry are slow and reluctant to translate things into English.
The value of manga is a bit less tangible, as they tend to be part of a larger entertainment strategy (along with toys, games, memorabilia).
[+] [-] DocTomoe|3 years ago|reply
It would be more honest to compare the digital manga market to the digital Korean webtoon market - but then you wouldn't be able to write a little-informed article putting one source of entertainment into decline as compared to another.
[+] [-] stone-monkey|3 years ago|reply
Recommendations: As someone mentioned earlier -
Peerless Dad
Administrator Kang Jin Lee (Same author as above - spin off series about one of the characters in the above comic)
Legend of the Northern Blade
Chronicles of the Heavenly Demon
Skeleton Soldier Couldn't Protect the Dungeon (I like it, but admit it's inconsistent. Also, author really likes to emphasize sexual violence against women early on - it's pretty grotty.)
Villain Unrivaled
Return of the Crazy Demon
Probably a lot of other series I like, but these are the ones from the top of my head that are generally pretty good.
[+] [-] stone-monkey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radicalbyte|3 years ago|reply
There was a massive paper shortage due to COVID combined with a big jump to digital.
I've had a hard time finding chapters of One Piece due to this - if you don't pre-order you're too late. Also the latest box set of 20 volumes is at this point still unobtainium :(
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rippercushions|3 years ago|reply
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/43985/webtoon-comics-pla...
And it's not just this one company: I don't read comics of any description (with the arguable exception of xkcd), but at one point my social media ads were saturated with borderline-NSFW spam for Korean porn comics. I was genuinely surprised the ads was allowed by the Google/Meta morality police, and after enough not interested/not appropriate reports it did stop as suddenly as it started. Or maybe they just ran out of ad budget?
[+] [-] Vt71fcAqt7|3 years ago|reply