Webtoon
A webtoon is a digital comic drawn as one continuous vertical strip, meant to be read by scrolling down a phone screen rather than turning pages. The format began in South Korea and is now used worldwide.
Why the format matters more than the label
“Webtoon” describes a delivery format, not a country or an art style. The defining constraint is that the reader holds a phone and moves in one direction: down. Everything that distinguishes a webtoon from a printed comic follows from that.
A print page is composed as a whole. The reader takes in the full layout before reading any single panel, which is why print artists can use an irregular grid, a double-page spread, or a panel that reads diagonally. None of that survives a phone. In a vertical strip the reader sees roughly one panel at a time, in a fixed order, and the artist controls the pace by controlling how much empty space sits between panels.
The practical differences
- The gutter does the timing. In print, a gutter is a few millimetres. In a webtoon it can be a whole screen of empty colour, and that emptiness is how a beat is held before a reveal.
- Panels are wide, not tall. A tall panel gets cut in half by the viewport. Most webtoon panels are wider than they are tall for exactly this reason.
- Colour is the default. Webtoons are usually full colour, where manga is usually not.
- Episodes, not chapters. Serialisation is weekly, and an episode is sized to a single sitting on a commute.
Where the word came from
The term is a portmanteau of “web” and “cartoon”, coined in South Korea in the early 2000s as portal sites began hosting comics natively rather than scanning print pages. Naver and Daum built the first large platforms. WEBTOON, the app most English readers mean when they say the word, is Naver’s international service — which is why “webtoon” is simultaneously a format, a tradition, and a brand, and why the three get confused constantly.
Korean webtoons are also manhwa. Not all manhwa are webtoons: the word predates the format and covers print comics too.
Related terms
- Manhwa Manhwa is the Korean word for comics. In English it usually means a South Korean comic, most often a full-colour vertical-scroll webtoon, as distinct from Japanese manga or Chinese manhua.
- Vertical scroll Vertical scroll is a comic format laid out as one tall, continuous column read by scrolling down a phone screen instead of turning pages. It is the standard format for webtoons, where empty space between panels sets the pacing.
- Gutter A gutter is the empty space between two comic panels. The reader fills it in, imagining whatever happened between the two images, so the width of a gutter controls how much time the story skips and how long a beat is held.