Tag: Comics

Webtoon Recommendation: The friendly winter

Webtoon Recommendation: The friendly winter

by eastasianlover ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

One of the best webtoons I have ever read is “The Friendly Winter”.

A heart touching story by Mr. Lee Jun, it is about a girl who is 19 years old but has a body of and a 17 year old boy who has a mind of that of small children. The basic plot is about how their fateful meeting totally changes their lives.

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Han Da Jeong is a 19 year old girl with a rare body growth disorder. Her mother left her and her father; and married someone else. Her father is a worker who finds it difficult to make two ends meet. Then, in her neighbourhood lives a guy of same age as Da Jeong whom she is in love with, but has to pose as 9 year old girl in front of him because of her body. In a mall, she meets a panicked Min Seong  who is lost and helps him find his mother. Thus a new friendship forms and they start running into each other often. They feel comfortable and share their own worries and problems with each other. More characters are introduced as the webtoon progresses including Da Jeong’s mother and her beloved oppa’s girlfriend who happens to be her step sister from her mother’s second marriage.

This webtoon not only shows the difficulties in such people’s lives and their immediate family but also others’ attitude towards them. They are misunderstood quite often and have to face consequences for the things they have never done. This one is especially full of emotions and may make you cry too, sometimes. The best part is, you can actually feel their helplessness and are able to fully sympathize with the main characters.

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Highly recommended, even if you are just starting with webtoons. Awesome artwork and just 64 and some extra chapters. (Extra chapters are especially fun…… coz of Lee Jun’s avatar and the way he tells you things with just three or four apt expressions in the whole chapter) Here is the link – Mangahere (This won’t be in long strip format)

SCS Scantalations (From original scantalators, though this one doesn’t need scanning, but oh well….. and you can find raw too, if interested. And I haven’t seen how it looks, so can’t comment about format)

Enjoy!

New form of comics: Webtoons

New form of comics: Webtoons

by eastasianlover ♥ 11 Comments

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.

Orange Marmalade

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.

The Friendly Winter

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/