Have you ever read a webtoon? Of course you must have! You haven’t? You are definitely missing a lot! A lot!

Webtoons from Korea are becoming very popular these days. They are very easily accessible and are free of cost. And since they consist of colorful pictures, they are more appealing to the audiences. The effects sometimes are awesome. They go in a long panel, not pagewise. This, in many situations, helps to have more continuity in the chapter and provides more impact and weight in delivering the right emotion.

Some of the authors talk about how they make them through their webtoon itself. In one of them which I finished recently, The Friendly Winter, there was a chapter in which author told that he had used his own clicked photos as the base for backgrounds. That included his neighborhood buildings, shopping malls, streets etc. We can very well assume we are seeing a different kind of South Korea (real may be?) through those pictures.

The freelance translator community for webtoons is ever increasing too. There are a lot of groups and translators working on them like people on webtoonlive.com (at least they don’t need scanlations, that’s why the translation and all is economical too!)

And the plots! All of the stories I have read till now are fresh and out of this world. Be it ‘The Friendly Winter’ or ‘Nineteen Twenty one’. There is a vast variety of genres too, just like manga. Each one seems to give some message also. There are a lot of famous movies from South Korea which are adaptations of various webtoons. The examples include Apartment and Hello Schoolgirl by Kang Pul and Secretly Greatly released in 2010. Flower Boy Next Door, the K-drama starring Park Shin Hye and Yoon Shi Yoon, is also inspired from a webtoon called “I Steal Peeks At Him Every Day”. It also has elements related to webtoon making. You can easily see the characters in the drama (I have just watched the drama, not read the webtoon) using photoshop to draw the characters.

Webtoons are replacing the expensive Manhwa and Manga making. Both the forms of comics have seen a fall in sales in the recent years. The international craze for these is not going down since a lot of material is available online free of cost. But the home business is facing losses. And this is encouraging more people to take up this new introduction in the market. I am not saying manga reading is inferior or something. It has its own charm. It is a lot of hardwork. (Watch or read Bakuman and you’ll find out!) But seeing the trend, webtoons and similar forms may take over the other two in terms of popularity and fandom, in the coming years.

In the end I will say, the webtoons are totally changing the meaning and essence of comics making and reading. You try too. You easily find them on manga sites or see here: http://www.webtoonlive.com/