Digital Manga?

A couple of months ago, I had a good amount of free time so I started browsing through some lists of recommended manga. A lot of titles on the list were the same old same old that I had yet to get to (Akira, Oyasumi Punpun, etc.), but there were a few new entries that piqued my interest. So I go check out the first one on the list called "Tower of God". The first thing that stood out to me was the color. A lot of manga start off with a few pages of color... but for this, the whole thing was colored. The art also looked a lot less straight-edge than usual. The character designs were more rounded and the outlines were softer.

Tower of God: OMG color in manga?!!

And finally, I came to the realization that what I was reading wasn't manga. I've watched enough anime and read enough manga in my lifetime to know that names like Han Shinwoo aren't Japanese.

Turns out, what I've been reading was a Korean webtoon published on a website called Naver, which is like the Google of South Korea. The artists who create these webtoons are professionals, who put out a chapter a week with few exceptions.  And the writing for these webtoons are actually good! "Annarasumanara" was one of the best comics I read in 2013 and the art in particular was unique and stunningly beautiful.

Annarasumanara: I love the color contrast

I believe digital distribution is where the manga industry is eventually headed. Imagine manga in full color! Publishers could do that if they didn't have to worry about putting that in a magazine with a circulation of a million people. Naver has proven that webtoons work, and that they work very well. Japanese publishers has been slow to adapt, but there are still signs of technological shift. The remake of "One-Punch Man" by Yuusuke Murata is currently being published digitally on the Young Jump Web Comics site. In the west, many of us have been consuming manga from fan translated scans for as long as we can remember. But Crunchyroll has recently announced their simul-pub releases of several popular manga, including "Attack on Titan".

Webtoons open up a new realm of possibilities for manga, manhwa, and comics as a whole. Maybe artists and authors can pick out background music to play as we read. Or maybe they'll start incorporating gifs? Would that even be considered a comic anymore? Will the comic format become more and more cinematic as tie goes on? I don't know. But as a manga enthusiast, the possibilities are exciting. I look forward to the industries' future.