Because of the impact of the epidemic, the Korean film industry was greatly affected last year, and "The Ministers of Namsan" (남산의 부장들), which tells the story of the assassination of former South Korean President Park Chung-hee, not only did this result not only not count in the top ten in 2019, but even wrote the record of the lowest number of moviegoers in the past 20 years. However, for the online comic industry that does not need to bear the risk of group gathering, it is a completely different glory during the epidemic.
The number of subscriptions exceeded tens of millions, hundreds of millions of views, and the astronomical numbers that the film industry could not imagine were all realized in the virtual space, and this boom was even further extended to TV dramas. From "Itaewon Class" (이태원 클라스) produced by JTBC at the beginning of the year to the thriller "Sweet Home" (스위트홈) at the end of the year, there are at least more than 10 web comic adaptations in 2020 alone. With the joint efforts of TV stations and audio-visual platforms, the boom in online comics has continued to ferment under the chemical effect of TV dramas, breaking the business opportunities of won and making online comics a new hope for the Korean Wave under the epidemic.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="3" > ▌ 1990s: The era of web comics attached to sports news</h1>
Although it is a "new hope", the origin of the development of Korean web comics is actually not much later than other cultural industries. As the name suggests, "webcomics" are the product of the birth of the Internet, and the origin of the Korean web comic industry was the end of the 1990s, when the Internet became more common.
Before the advent of web comics, Korean comics were mainly attached to the "sports news" that began to explode in the 1990s, until the emergence of the Internet and the decline of paper sales, these works also followed the media network and entered the virtual space. Tracing the original ancestors of "web comics", it was in 1996, with the gradual popularization of computers, Bea Moo-na (박무직, 1973~), Qian Guiying (천계영, 1970~) and other writers who began to use computers to draw original manuscripts. However, compared with the way they are presented, these works are at best a technical improvement, until the 1998 work "Snowcat" by the writer Jeon Yoon-so (권윤주), which broke the framework of traditional comic books, was generally regarded as the first veritable "web comic" work.
Unlike works that are limited to the form of newspaper serials, rather than directly putting the contents of paper on the Internet, "Snowcat" is the first web comic work to draw a "roller-like movement" up and down according to the needs of the web browser. In terms of content, "Snowcat", which uses fictional cats to tell the daily life of ordinary people, is also shorter and more lifelike than other serial comics, and can resonate with readers, and these features have later become one of the major features of online comics.
Although works have begun to appear, the web comics at that time will still be attached to the news media, or only published in the author's personal website and blog, and the publishing platform that is truly exclusive to the web comics will not be born until the 21st century.
Although works have begun to appear, but the network comics at that time are still attached to the news media, the real exclusive publishing platform for online comics, until the 21st century, the popularity of smart phones, will not be born.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="9" >▌ The development period of web comics in the 2000s: when the portal also participated in the war</h1>
According to the Korea Content Promotion Agency, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, web comics that appeared before 2000 accounted for only 3.5% of the total manga distribution, and it was not until the 21st century that they entered the growth period. And all this is closely related to the development of Korean entrance websites.
Who was the first portal to provide webmanding services? The answer: Yahoo South Korea. But compared to the common web-comic platform now, Yahoo Korea in 2002 (Yahoo! Korea) just moved the already published comic strip to the portal. With the introduction of new services by rivals, Daum, who had just won the throne of the largest Korean portal by relying on e-mail services, also opened the "World in Manga" that provided similar services in 2003, so that future web comics could gain the soil for development.
With soil, the next step is the need for proper seeds. Although there were already works such as "Snowcat" that were in line with browser habits, most of the comics on the Internet were still serial comics that had been published or published in newspapers and magazines, which also greatly reduced the reader's reading experience and freshness. Fortunately, in October of that year, the well-known cartoonist Jiang Cao (강풀), full of TV drama style "Pure Love Comics" (순정만화) was published on the Internet and became very popular, not only laying the foundation for the neat narrative style of "one word and one story" for future web comics, but also different from the reading line of past paper comics, so that the webcomics of "roller reading in a straight line" became the mainstream of creation.
The success of "Pure Love Comics", in addition to writing down the milestones of online comics, also allows major entrance websites to begin to see the market potential of online comics, and online comics have changed from a free service that is simply used to attract viewers to a golden rooster. After Yahoo Korea and Daum, the portal websites "Paran" and "Empas" also rely on online comic services, once occupying the top three thrones of the portal website, and "Naver", which will become the hegemon of the Korean Internet in the future, also officially entered the online comic market in 2005.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="14" > ▌Milestone in 2006: The birth of "Legend" of web comics and the first filmization</h1>
As a variety of platforms appeared, online comic writers began to show their skills, including the writer Zhao Yi (조석, 1983~) who is known as the "legend" of online comics, and his work "Voice of the Heart" (마음의 소리). Serialized from September 2006 until July 2020, the series was not officially concluded until July 2020, focusing on the absurd stories of the writers themselves and their families, "The Voice of the Heart" was serialized for nearly 14 years, with 1,229 episodes, and the writer was even nicknamed "Naver's civil servant".
Combining nonsense and everyday life, the funny content of "The Voice of the Heart" has attracted millions of people to watch, and the number of views has even accumulated to billions, not only the longest green work in the history of Korean internet comics, but also making Zhao Yi himself the most popular writer for ten consecutive years. In 2016, the Korean drama work of the same name adapted from the web comic, "The Voice of the Heart", also hired lee kwang-so (이광수, 1985~), Kim Mi-kyung (김미경, 1963~) and other popular actors to perform.
In addition to the birth of "The Voice of the Heart", another major event in the online comic industry in 2006 was that Jiang Cao's work "Apartment" (아파트, 2004) was remade into a film of the same name. Although in the end, both the evaluation and the box office were not very good, it wrote a milestone for the first time that the web comic entered the film circle, laying the foundation for the same cinematic and popular works such as "The Great Hidden" (은밀하게위대하게), "Walking with God" (신과함께), etc.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="18" > ▌ The birth of smartphones: the heyday of web comics is coming</h1>
Just as the rocket launch will be divided into two stages, Korean web comics rely on platforms and diverse creative content to allow users and page views to grow rapidly, but the highlight is still to come. In 2009, the world's first smartphone came out, the Internet became a tool that humans can access at any time, and the growth rate of the web comics market has also reached another peak.
From KRW 52.9 billion in 2010 and 584.5 billion in 2016 to KRW 880.5 billion in 2018, the Korean web industry market has reached new highs at a rate of doubling almost every two years. In addition to the popularization of smart phones, the addition of the film and drama industry is also indispensable. 、
For the film and drama industry, direct remakes of popular web comics can reduce market risks, and for the web comics industry, in addition to charging through content in the past, it can also be directly or indirectly benefited by authorizing remakes. Coupled with the expansion of foreign markets after 2012, the output value has been continuously improved. In 2020, the Kakao and Naver platforms alone earned more than 1,300 billion won, which also wrote a new record in history.
While the company profits, the treatment of online comic writers continues to improve. According to the same survey by the Content Promotion Institute, through the cost of the original manuscript and the distribution of platform revenue, the average annual income of writers who have created serial works in 2020 is 48.41 million won, an increase of 160,000 won compared with last year, and even many writers have earned more than 100 million won per year. However, just when everything seems to be in a good situation, the revenue distribution model of the online comic platform has set a trap that newcomer writers who want to enter the industry cannot detect.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="23" > ▌ Opaque returns and the "minimum guarantee" trap</h1>
The income of online comic writers is mainly based on the distribution of manuscript fees, minimum security funds and platform income. Taking the basic contract of the 2015 online comic platform "Lezhin Comics" as an example, as long as each writer creates one sentence per week and continues to serialize, he can get a minimum deposit of 2 million won per month, which is equivalent to 500,000 won per word. And as long as the income of the work exceeds 2 million won in the week, it can be divided with the platform. That is to say, assuming that the work receives 2.01 million yuan in income, the writer can also get 5,000 yuan in income distribution in addition to the original 2 million.
However, as this pie grows larger and the number of writers invested increases, some online comic platforms have also begun to secretly improve the threshold of revenue distribution. According to the "Korean Nationality" report, some platforms still maintain the contract content of "four words per week, 500,000 words per word, and a minimum deposit of 2 million yuan" on the surface, but in fact, the minimum deposit that should have been calculated separately is counted in addition to the platform income distribution. In other words, the platform "gives the writer 2 million first", but divides the income of the work into the door. In the future, as long as the weekly earnings do not exceed 4 million, there will be no additional profit generated. This can lead to the consequence that the author of a non-popular work "only gets a deposit, but never earns a profit".
In addition, the calculation method of increasing the score threshold is not weekly or monthly, but will continue to accumulate to form an invisible "debt", even if there is a sudden week of explosive income, it may also become a void because of the previous "outstanding" income black hole. Originally well-intentioned, the policy of allowing writers to have a stable income even in the early stages of creation has now become a prison where fresh people can't eat but don't starve. Some paid platforms even use the excuse of "increasing popularity" to force writers to publish their works for free after a certain period of time, and such a "limited time fee" policy not only makes writers lose a lot of potential income, but also some people fall into depression and have been depressed ever since.
Not only is the threshold higher, but the platform's opaque revenue structure has also become a major variable in whether online comic writers can make a profit. According to the Korea Content Promotion Agency, the revenue of the online comic platform includes readers' subscriptions, advertisements, sales licenses and copyrights, etc., while the cost is platform management, personnel expenses and marketing. Although platforms do have reasons to charge fees when they need to pay expenses and have to bear the minimum deposit for writers, these figures are often not clearly explained to writers.
And this situation, after the emergence of "network comic agency companies", is even worse.
Instead of the writer himself signing contracts with the platform in the past, in the 2010s, it became popular for the platform to entrust the signing of contracts and other things to the agency company, and the agency company signed the contract with the writer in turn. On the surface, it is convenient to manage, but in fact, it causes writers to be unable to communicate with platform personnel. In the situation of having to pay an additional fee when it is not clear what the platform signs with the agency company, the writer may only get 10% of the total income in the end. Some platforms even set up their own agency companies, so that many victimized writers think: "It is basically two layers of skin by the same company."
The revenue of the web comic platform includes readers' subscriptions, advertisements, sales of licenses and copyrights, etc., while the cost is platform management, personnel expenses and marketing. Although platforms do have reasons to charge fees when they need to pay expenses and have to bear the minimum deposit for writers, these figures are often not clearly explained to writers.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="31" >▌ Pornography and hate content under the umbrella of pluralism</h1>
In addition to the blind spots of the revenue structure, web comics, which are always proud of their diverse content, have often caused controversy because of hate, pornography, or extreme ideological content. Although just like television programs, online comics also have a grading system, but the management method based on the autonomy of the cartoonists association is still unable to prevent social doubts.
"1,000 yuan, 2,000 yuan, 3,000 yuan at a time, so saved for three years", "secret transactions around well-known anchors", ambiguous text plus suggestive pictures, adult online comics advertising through the network of far-reaching, even people in Taiwan can not be spared. While the online comic market is growing, the gold content of adult web comics is even rising, and there are even platforms specializing in adult web comics to survive. In order to get more subscriptions, these adult web comic ads are placed on major websites, but because of poor management, resulting in the risk of children touching or even clicking. As early as 2016, some parents submitted books to the media, but finally got the conclusion that "the platform said that it was the responsibility of the advertiser, the advertiser said that the advertisement itself was not restricted, and the government said that it belonged to the autonomous category of the Cartoonists Association and could not be managed".
In addition to the flood of pornographic advertisements, under the packaging of multiple contents, online comics are also prone to controversial content such as vendetta, crime, and discrimination. For example, "Hellper 2: KILLBEROS" (헬퍼2: 킬베로스), which was listed on the "Naver Webtoon" last year by the writer Qi An84, once caused a reader backlash because it was too explicit about the sexual exploitation of minors; another work of the same writer, "The King of Restoration", "복학왕", was accused of "female dislike" remarks because of discrimination against people with disabilities and the content of female subordinates obtaining regular employees through relationships with their superiors. It even triggered more than 50,000 citizens to sign the Bulletin Board of the Blue House, hoping to end the serialization.
In addition, the fact that readers can reply in real time and communicate anonymously has become another gray area. In 2019, "Naver Webtoon" once announced the suspension of its writers because of malicious comment attacks, and threatened to impose sanctions on these commentators, triggering a discussion between "comments" and "bad reviews". In the comment area of the 2020 work "Luck Super ~ Good Day" (운수 오진 날), the remarks of abusive Chinese accidentally became the most popular "best comments", which also showed the negative effect that the opinion column is easy to gather extreme remarks.
The accumulated results of the past, coupled with the great success of stepping into film and drama in 2020, have allowed Korean web comics to successfully shake Japan's hegemony as a manga empire. In 2021, it is expected that there will be more than 10 film and television adaptations, and in the next 2 to 3 years, There will be 65 adaptations of Kakao alone, and the importance of web comics in the Korean Wave after the epidemic can be imagined.
Like the overall development of South Korea, the rise of the web comic empire also depends on the stable support of large enterprises, but in order to create good works, writers who work more than 10 hours a day and exert multiple creativity are indispensable. Under the premise of content freedom, how writers and readers self-discipline and maintain the environment is also one of the variables of future development.
From the original free add-on service to today's K-pop market "supernova", the development of Korean online comics itself is like an inspiring manga theme, but while shining, how to avoid the story "walking the clock" will also be an inevitable problem.