South Korea’s booming ‘webtoons’ put Japan’s print manga on notice

Unlike Japanese manga, which in most cases are first marketed for a print audience and only subsequently promoted online via apps, webtoons cater to digital device users from the get-go: Their format has already been optimized for personal computers or smartphones. Once they spread on popular manga apps in Japan, the digital South Korean comics immediately attracted a youth following here. But as publishers continued looking inward, markets overseas — especially in South Korea and China — increasingly shifted away from Japan’s traditional print manga to develop their own content in the form of webtoons, they say.

Source: www.japantimes.co.jp