Forget Manga. Here's Manhwa

Comics account for 25% all book sales in South Korea. Can they replicate that success—and challenge traditional Japanese market dominance—in the US?

by David Welsh

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The cover of Banya: The Explosive Deliveryman, created by Kim Young-Oh and released by Dark Horse Comics in 2006. Dark Horse Comics

An interior page from Banya: The Explosive Deliveryman. Dark Horse Comics

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American comics connoisseurs, add this to your personal lexicon: manhwa. It's the Korean term for comics, just as manga denotes comics from Japan, and with a host of publishers bringing new manhwa titles to the States for the first time, it's poised to become a household word among fanboys and pop culture mavens alike.

The manhwa invasion has been a long time coming. Manga wedged open the cross-cultural door in the '80s, bringing a fresh sensibility to fans raised on Superman and X-Men. But even with the subsequent comics explosion in America, manhwa has remained almost entirely in manga's shadow. Early Korean releases were often published as manga, with no marketing effort to distinguish their true origins. Aside from the fact that they're read from front to back and left to right, a reader unfamiliar with Korean comics might have found it difficult to place books like the gothic western Priest, or painterly supernatural romance Model, in a specific cultural tradition of cartooning. And yet it is a tradition as passionately maintained as that of Japan. According to one manhwa publisher, comics accounts for about 25 percent of all book sales in South Korea, while more than 3 million Korean users access paid online manhwa and 10 million read free webcomics. And, thanks in part to a comics industry that tends to cede more control to artists, manhwa allows for a level of individual expression, in storytelling and style, that is not always found in manga.

Now, as a growing number of comics publishers in the U.S. have begun treating manhwa as a distinct form, newcomers to Korean comics have access to a diverse range of genres, from raucous comedies and tense science fiction and fantasy to high-octane adventure, period dramas, and slice-of-life romances. Even "boys'-love" stories for women—romances that don't address gay themes in a traditional sense but focus on intense emotional connections between beautiful male protagonists—are making their way to American bookstore shelves.

Leading the U.S. charge are two Korean-owned publishing concerns, Ice Kunion and Netcomics. Ice Kunion, a consortium of Korean publishers who joined forces to bring their titles directly to English-speaking readers, has debuted with releases targeted at young women. (The Japanese equivalent, shôjo, was an early hit in America with titles like Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon.) Ju-Yuon Lee, Ice Kunion's senior editor, aims to "provide books that the audience would already like, but also try to introduce some titles that have more of a Korean touch."

Choosing manhwa titles that will appeal to an American audience represents one challenge; another is the introduction of the Korean web-publishing approach. "In recent years, the market in Korea for print books of manhwa has been shrinking rapidly," says Heewoon Chung, head of the Jersey City, New Jersey–based Netcomics, and its parent company, Ecomix. One of Korea's leading providers of online comics, Ecomix has also broken into the promising market of manhwa for mobile devices like cell phones. Says Chung, "There have been some breakthrough titles originating on the web. Korea's online comics market is evolving, and you can't find this kind of market anywhere else."

Considering American comics fans' comfort on the web, Chung can reasonably hope to develop a similar market here. Netcomics caters to the U.S. audience's customary means of consumption with print titles, but it's the company's online delivery system that has potential to change the face of comics publishing in this country. Visitors to the publisher's website can sample the company's growing roster of titles for roughly 25 cents a chapter. Chung estimates that by this spring, Netcomics will have 75 volumes of 25 series in print, and more than 120 volumes of 30 series on the web.