JUST yesterday I gave the library director my elevator rant about why webtoon is evil lmao webcomic library is your friend
I agree but I’d still like to listen to your rant
I have not personally tried to host my comic on webtoon so this is all coming from friends in the trenches, but basically it’s very geared towards marketable homogeneity and anything that doesn’t have a professional level of polish gets swept under the rug. It treats webcomics like an IP farm for potential lucrative netflix deals instead of, say… an art form with its own merits. And for my Old Man Moment: it’s become such a juggernaut that people are starting to ignore anything that isn’t hosted there, and using “webtoon” generically for “webcomic.”
Webcomics started as punk outsider art and seeing them molded into consumer products makes me seethe
gonna ramble out my ass because i don’t feel like pulling sources, i was originally adding this to someone else’s reblog but then it got too long and i went on too many tangents so that didn’t make sense anymore but ANYWAY
“webtoon” is a specific sub-type of webcomic that originated in south korea specifically, and it adopted the scrolling format because the format was more readable on phones (compare this to the recently-killed-by-amazon comixology, which had a proprietary ‘smart’ viewer for traditional page layouts that let you swipe from panel to panel). in korea the big ones are kakao webtoon (recently swallowed tapas) and naver webtoon (webtoon.com, recently swallowed wattpad, owners of line corp if you’re familiar)
naver is very comparable to google, it even started as a web portal and search engine iirc. they run webtoon as an exploitative entertainment company similar to television. a number of panels that if laid out in pages would be enough to make a chapter are posted all at once as an 'episode’, and creators are expected to be able to post a new episode once a week that naver can charge for with microtransactions and also stick ads on. even with a buffer, that’s a ridiculous amount of output. the most popular comics tend to have whole teams, and imports have whole production companies paying to adapt popular webnovels into webtoons and then license the translations.
i’m trying to think of a good metaphor but to be honest this is very similar to the ways indie comics have always gotten fucked. every comic shop always leaned hard on DC and Marvel and big glossy mags full of ads and meanwhile weirdos who got lucky could make comic strips to run in local alt weeklies. Dykes To Watch Out For wasn’t selling in mylar bags. maybe the metaphor here is that people are asking for indie comics and when you try to point them toward DTWOF they’re confused that it isn’t Sandman.
because webcomic used to mean, specifically, self-published. it used to mean one person, maybe two. it used to get sneered at, because self-publishing meant you weren’t good enough to get published. and webcomics got fucking weird and mostly terrible, the way any art that gets democratized gets weird and mostly terrible, and all the ways that it’s terrible are also the ways that it’s great. but now it’s all one word meant to encapsulate achewood and homestuck and solo leveling as if that’s a single genre or even format.
(the illustrator of solo leveling, jang-sung rak, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in july of 2022. starting in 2018 he published on a grueling schedule with only short hiatuses to deal with a chronic illness. i cannot say for sure it was related to overwork, but i do not know how you can have that level of output and be well.)
there are genuine interesting innovations to the scrolling format, like the use of blank space for dramatic pauses between panels, or reveals that only work when you can’t see the bottom of a panel when you see the top. as a Certified Garbage Enjoyer, i love seeing the innovations that are born out of profit-fueled limitations. like sunday comics. i almost went on a two paragraph tangent about sunday newspaper comics and i didn’t, you’re welcome.
but it’s also true that webtoons look like absolute dogshit on a computer or tablet. they are for phones, and they are disposable, to click and scroll and read once and never look at again. almost none of them make it to print. and it sucks that it’s becoming treated as the default format for comics. and it extremely sucks that, if you want to read korean comics in particular, webtoons are pretty much your only option.
there is no thesis to this! i do not have solutions to offer, aside from supporting creators directly whenever you can. if an artist crossposts to a corporate webtoon platform, consider following them Anywhere Else If Possible. get an rss reader instead of using a webcomic platform’s app. if you like a creator, find ways to follow them so that if they strike out on their own you can be there to support them. i won’t pretend this is a webtoon specific issue because publishers have always treated comic creators like shit. but there was a period where being a webcomic meant it was the rare kind of comic where the creator wasn’t getting fucked, and that time is gone now.
ALT
I’m still technically taking a break from this but it’s very important to me that anyone following this blog understands there are Reasons I do not fuck with webtoons myself lmao
ALT