Media, Culture and Communication in Asia-Pacific Societies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. xviii, 234 pp. (Tables.) US$110.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78660-635-8.
Not until recently has academic attention been paid to webtoons, an emergent genre of digital comics that has become one of the most economically successful cultural industries in South Korea. A recent search on Google Scholar (February 6, 2022) shows that more than two-thirds of the English literature on webtoons has been written within the last three years, with few comprehensive approaches. This book is designed to address this gap as part of the “Media, Culture and Communication in Asia-Pacific Society” series.
The volume explores almost every aspect of the webtoon world (or simply “webtooniverse” as termed by the authors), investigating the complicated relations between actors and institutions in the webtoon industry—comic artists, platforms, agencies, policymakers, translators, and global readers—while analyzing how the actors and their changing relations have contributed to the transformation of Korea’s media and creative industries ecosystems. Enduring the pain of dealing with the pre-history of webtoons, the book begins its analysis by detailing the rise and fall of the print-comics industry in Korea to explain the background against which webtoons have emerged. It examines how print comics have been restructured into webtoons following a series of debates on the Korean government’s censorship over the content of comics and control over the industry’s illegal pirating/camouflaging of Japanese manga (chapter 2). As webtoons became popular, these problems were slowly resolved by negotiations between the industry and the government, for example, through the establishment of industry associations and self-regulation initiatives (chapter 3). In contrast, a neoliberal government policy stance (with the slogan “support without intervention”) (73) was developed that actively encouraged the industry to expand the commercial value and use of cartoons in a broader industry context, such as delivering transmedia IP or one-source-multi-use content, which was pursued aggressively through web portals such as Kakao (previously called Daum) and, later, Naver (chapter 4).
Furthermore, discussing the emergence of second-generation webtoon platforms (such as KakaoPage and Lezhin Comics) that developed a mixed payment system (for instance, providing “[only] free-if-you-wait” content), the authors tackle the issues of the commercialization of webtoons in reference to a variety of social actors (chapter 5). For instance, the diversification of webtoon platforms has led not only to technological progress, but also to controversy over compensation for creators’ labour. Such an attempt to develop the author’s unique critical perspective is notable, albeit this perspective sometimes could have been richer through adopting a more comprehensive sample (including, for instance, quasi-monopolistic platforms in the industry such as Naver, which is also in conflict with webtoon creators over unfair labour contracts).
Further, webtoon-related social topics and terms are examined through a focus on the technically innovative (chapter 6), branded webtoons (chapter 7), as well as K-pop webtoons (chapter 8) in the second half of the book. Perhaps a fuller discussion of the terms—for instance, defining branded webtoons outside of soft power theory while comparing similarities and differences across other critical media/communication and/or globalization theories—could have helped enrich what is already a critical evaluation of such concepts.
However, this does not mean—behind the intriguing image of a webtooniverse—that this book simply celebrates the geographical expansion of the reach of webtoons. Overall, it speaks about broader aspects of the relationship between the various institutional elements and actors that make up such a universe. This book should be treated as more than a simple English guide to webtoons. It would suit critical readers and scholars interested in the political and social effects of culture revolutionary technological progress in new media ecologies represented by webtoons.
Ji Hyeon Kim
Yonsei University, Seoul