Swipe Right on Webtoons: Why Manga Fans Are Obsessing Over Korean Comics Right Now
Something shifted in the past few years, and if you've been deep in anime Twitter or lurking on manga subreddits, you've probably felt it. Between posts about the latest Jujutsu Kaisen chapter and debates over which isekai protagonist deserves their own spin-off, a new kind of conversation started popping up — one about webtoons. Not manga. Not anime. Korean digital comics, built for your phone screen and delivered one vertical scroll at a time.
And honestly? They've been eating.
What Even Is a Webtoon, and Why Does It Hit Different?
For the uninitiated: webtoons are digital comics originally developed in South Korea, designed specifically to be read on smartphones. Instead of the right-to-left page-flipping format you'd expect from manga, webtoons are read by scrolling down — long, continuous strips of panels that feel almost cinematic in how they pace a scene. The color is another thing. While manga is typically black and white, most webtoons are fully colored, giving them a visual pop that stops you mid-scroll.
Platforms like WEBTOON (the app, run by Naver) and Tapas have become the main hubs for English-speaking readers in the US, and the numbers they're putting up are hard to ignore. WEBTOON alone reportedly surpassed 85 million monthly active users globally, with a massive chunk of that audience based in North America. That's not a niche. That's a movement.
The Manga Fan Pipeline Is Very Real
Here's what's interesting: webtoons aren't really stealing manga readers so much as they're expanding what those readers consume. Fans who grew up on Naruto and One Piece and later got into Demon Slayer are the same people now binging Solo Leveling, Tower of God, and Lore Olympus at 2 a.m. The fandoms overlap in ways that feel almost inevitable.
Part of that is the storytelling DNA. A lot of popular webtoons pull from the same genre wells that anime fans already love — epic fantasy, overpowered protagonists, slow-burn romance, found family dynamics. Solo Leveling especially became a gateway drug for a huge wave of readers who described it as "what if manhwa was just built different." (Manhwa, for the record, is the Korean term for comics — webtoons are a format, manhwa is the origin.)
Creators who work across both worlds have noticed the crossover too. Independent artists who built audiences on platforms like Tapas often describe their readership as "manga fans who ran out of chapters to wait for." The format lends itself to frequent updates — sometimes multiple times a week — which scratches that same itch manga readers get from weekly Shonen Jump drops.
From Scroll to Screen: The Adaptation Wave
If there's one thing that signals webtoons have officially arrived in the cultural conversation, it's the adaptation pipeline that's been building behind the scenes. Tower of God got an anime adaptation through Crunchyroll back in 2020, and while the reception was mixed, it cracked open a door that studios have been walking through ever since. The God of High School followed, and Noblesse wasn't far behind.
But the real turning point? Solo Leveling getting a full anime adaptation from A-1 Pictures — the same studio behind Sword Art Online and Your Lie in April — was basically the industry saying: webtoon IPs are worth serious investment. The show dropped in early 2024 and immediately became one of the most-watched anime of the season. Not most-watched manhwa adaptation. Most-watched anime, full stop.
This is a big deal. It signals that the line between "anime" and "animated webtoon adaptation" is getting blurrier, and US audiences — who already don't always make sharp distinctions between Japanese and Korean pop culture — are here for it.
The Creator Side: Building an Audience One Episode at a Time
What makes the webtoon ecosystem genuinely exciting from a creator standpoint is how accessible it is compared to traditional manga publishing. Breaking into a major Japanese manga magazine like Weekly Shonen Jump still involves a pretty rigid system — pitching to editors, serialization decisions made by committee, strict page count rules. WEBTOON's Canvas platform, by contrast, lets independent creators publish directly to readers with zero gatekeeping. If the story connects, it grows.
American creators have leaned into this hard. Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe — a retelling of the Persephone and Hades myth with a pastel color palette and deeply modern emotional intelligence — became one of the most-read webtoons on the platform and eventually landed a print deal with Random House Graphic. It later won an Eisner Award, which is basically the Oscars of the comics world. That trajectory, from free digital serialization to award-winning print release, is a blueprint a lot of creators are now following.
For anime and manga fans who also create — fan artists, aspiring mangaka, people who've been sitting on a story idea for years — webtoons offer something traditional publishing rarely does: a direct line to an audience that's already primed for exactly what you're making.
Is This a Threat to Manga, or Just More of What We Love?
Here's the honest answer: probably neither. Manga isn't going anywhere. The US manga market has been on a sustained growth run, with publishers like Viz Media and Yen Press reporting record sales years back-to-back. If anything, the rise of webtoons has helped normalize the habit of reading comics digitally and following serialized stories on a weekly basis — behaviors that feed right back into manga consumption too.
What webtoons are doing is expanding the definition of what "comics for anime fans" can mean. The genre is no longer exclusively Japanese. The format is no longer exclusively print or right-to-left. The creators are no longer exclusively from one country. And honestly, as someone who loves this space, that feels like a win.
The next series you can't stop thinking about, the one you'll be recommending to every single person you know, might be a Korean webtoon updating three times a week on an app already sitting on your phone.
Might be worth a scroll.
