A beginner’s guide to Korean webtoons

The first webtoon I ever read, I didn't know was a webtoon. I'd just finished the K-drama *Business Proposal*, loved every silly minute of it, and went hunting for "more like this." A comment pointed me to the original comic. I opened it on my phone expecting pages to swipe. Instead I just scrolled. Down and down, one long ribbon of color, dialogue drifting past like a group chat. Two hours were gone before I looked up.

If you found Korea through K-dramas, K-pop, or a plate of something spicy, webtoons are the layer sitting right underneath a huge amount of it. *True Beauty*, *Sweet Home*, *Itaewon Class*, *Solo Leveling* were all webtoons before they were shows. This guide is the thing I wish someone had handed me on day one: what a webtoon actually is, where it came from, which app to open, how to read for free, and where to start so you're not paralyzed by a library of a million titles.

What exactly is a webtoon?

A webtoon is a comic built for a phone. Instead of rectangular pages you flip, it's a single vertical strip you scroll from top to bottom, usually in full color, released one episode at a time. Most series drop a new chapter once a week, each one running maybe 60 to 80 panels and a five-to-ten-minute read. The name is simply "web" plus "cartoon."

That word gets tangled with two others, so here's the clean version. *Manga* is Japanese comics: printed black-and-white, read right to left. *Manhwa* is the Korean word for comics in general, and it can mean a physical book. *Webtoon* describes a format, not a country: a vertical-scroll digital comic. Most Korean webtoons are manhwa, but not all manhwa are webtoons. Koreans use these words loosely in conversation, and honestly, so will you after a week.

The vertical scroll isn't a gimmick. Artists treat the empty space between panels as timing. A long blank gap before a reveal is a held breath. A jump-scare in a horror series lands because you scrolled down into it, not because you turned a page and saw it coming a beat early. Once you feel that rhythm, flat page-comics start to seem a little static by comparison.

Where webtoons came from

Korea didn't invent comics, but it did invent this way of reading them, and the timing is oddly specific. In the late 1990s, after the 1997 Asian financial crisis gutted Korea's print-comic industry, artists who couldn't get published started posting work straight to the web. Early Korean portals began hosting these strips, and the word "webtoon" stuck to them.

The real turning point came in 2003. A cartoonist who goes by the pen name Kang Full posted a series called *Love Story* (*Sunjeong Manhwa*) on the portal Daum, and it was one of the first drawn deliberately for vertical scrolling rather than scanned from book pages. Readers swarmed it, at times pulling millions of daily visitors, and Daum's comics service became the world's first true webtoon platform.

Two years later, in 2005, a Naver programmer named Junkoo Kim, a comics obsessive frustrated that talented artists had nowhere to publish, launched Naver Webtoon. That platform became the giant: free to read, ad-supported, open to amateurs alongside professionals. In 2013, Lezhin Comics introduced a pay-per-episode model aimed at more mature, adult-leaning work. And to show how far the whole thing traveled, in June 2024 Naver's webtoon business listed on the Nasdaq in New York as Webtoon Entertainment under the ticker WBTN, raising around $315 million and opening at $21.30 a share. A format that began with laid-off artists posting online became a company valued in the billions.

How to actually start reading

The main app for English readers is just called WEBTOON, the Naver one. It's free on iOS and Android, there's a website too, and you don't even need an account to start. Here's the honest workflow:

• Download WEBTOON, open the Originals or Genres tab, and pick something. Thousands of complete series are free start to finish, no strings.
• For ongoing series, you can read every published episode up to a point for nothing. To jump ahead of everyone else and read the newest few chapters early, you use Fast Pass: you spend a little in-app currency called Coins to unlock them. Wait a week or two and those exact episodes go free anyway.
• Coins cost real money, roughly a few dollars for a stack, but you never have to buy them to enjoy the platform. I read for months on free episodes alone before I ever spent a cent.

One recent change trips people up. WEBTOON retired its old "Daily Pass" system in 2025. In its place you'll now see an Ad Pass: watch a short ad and an episode unlocks free for three days, or pay Coins to keep it. If a listicle you find online still explains Daily Pass, it's out of date, which tells you how fast this space moves.

WEBTOON isn't the only option. Tapas is its English-language sibling with a slightly different catalog. Lezhin leans mature and pay-to-read. The other Korean heavyweight is Kakao, whose app Piccoma is the top-grossing comics app in Japan, which is a decent sign the format works far beyond Korea. For a first-timer, though, stick with WEBTOON. Fewer decisions, more free reading.

Reading in the original Korean

If you're learning the language, webtoons are one of the least painful ways to practice, and I mean that literally. The dialogue is short, casual, and repeated across episodes, so the same everyday phrases keep resurfacing until they stick. The Korean-language app (네이버 웹툰) carries a far bigger catalog than the English one, and slice-of-life or romance series use the kind of language you'd actually text a friend, not textbook sentences.

You don't need fluency to try. If you can read Hangeul, and you genuinely can learn the alphabet over a weekend, you can sound out a romance webtoon with a dictionary open in another tab. You'll start recognizing words you've only ever heard shouted in dramas. Reading something you actually want to finish beats any flashcard app I've tried.

The genres you'll run into

Webtoon genre tags read a little differently from Western comics, so here's a quick map. You'll find the usual romance, fantasy, action, comedy, thriller, and slice-of-life. Then a few very webtoon-specific corners worth knowing by name:

• Regression and leveling-up: a hero dies or fails, then wakes back at the beginning to do it "right," or grows stronger by clearing game-like levels. *Solo Leveling* is the poster child of the whole category.
• Isekai and transmigration: an ordinary person wakes up inside a novel or another world, often as a doomed side character scrambling to survive the plot they suddenly know the ending of.
• Sageuk, the historical shelf: palace intrigue, Joseon-era romance, court politics and revenge. If you loved historical K-dramas, this is your aisle.
• Sports, office romance, horror, and BL/GL: all enormous, all with deep back-catalogs.

If the historical stuff hooks you, a quick read on the Joseon dynasty makes the palace politics land a lot harder. Half the fun of sageuk webtoons is catching which real king or scandal a story is quietly borrowing from.

Where to start: titles worth your first week

Instead of a hundred names, here's a short and opinionated list sorted by what you already like.

• If you came for K-drama romance: *True Beauty*, by the artist Yaongyi, and *Business Proposal*. Both became hit dramas. *True Beauty*'s 2020 series cast ASTRO idol Cha Eun-woo as its male lead, which tells you exactly how tightly webtoons and the K-pop industry overlap.
• If you want epic fantasy and action: *Tower of God* by the artist SIU, a Naver flagship running since 2010 that spawned its own anime, and *Solo Leveling*, which went from web novel to a KakaoPage webtoon in 2018 (art by Jang Sung-rak, pen name DUBU) to a 2024 anime that broke out worldwide.
• If you love horror and thrillers: *Sweet Home*, the monster-apartment nightmare behind the Netflix series.
• If you want something soft: *Seasons of Blossom* for gentle school romance, or *Let's Play* for a rom-com about a struggling game developer.

One honest caveat. The platform is bigger than Korea now. *Lore Olympus*, a wildly popular Hades-and-Persephone retelling, is a WEBTOON smash made by a New Zealand artist. Read it and enjoy it, just know it isn't manhwa. It's proof the Korean format went fully global.

Why every K-drama seems to start as a webtoon

Now the part that brought most of us here. Since the mid-2010s, webtoons have become the single richest source of material for Korean film and TV. A studio can see, before spending a single won, that a story already has millions of readers and a proven ending. That's a far safer bet than an untested original script, and it's why the pipeline keeps flowing.

The list of adaptations is long and probably already includes something on your watch history: *Itaewon Class*, *Sweet Home*, *All of Us Are Dead* (from the Naver webtoon *Now at Our School*), *Hellbound*, *D.P.*, *Kingdom*, *True Beauty*, *Business Proposal*. Reading the source first is its own quiet pleasure. You catch what the show trimmed, and you see the art the actors were cast to resemble.

*Itaewon Class* is a good example, because its namesake Seoul neighborhood is a real place you can walk through in an afternoon. If you're the kind of traveler who likes standing where a scene was shot, our guide to K-drama filming locations pairs neatly with reading the webtoons those shows grew out of. Do both and a single street corner carries three layers of story at once.

A few things I wish I'd known

• Read on your phone, not a laptop. The format was designed for a vertical screen and a thumb. On a wide monitor it feels genuinely wrong, panels stranded in a sea of gray.
• Don't binge straight to the paywall in one night. On ongoing series you'll hit the Fast Pass wall and be tempted to spend. Let the episodes go free on their own. The wait becomes part of the ritual, the same way people here quietly time their week around a favorite series' update day.
• Turn on dark mode for horror. I learned this the hard way, reading *Sweet Home* at one in the morning with every light on.
• Mind the ratings. Lezhin and some Originals run genuinely adult. The apps label them, so glance before you start scrolling in a crowded café.

That last habit is the real gateway, honestly. Look around a Seoul train at rush hour and a startling share of the phones are mid-scroll on a webtoon on the way to work. Once you've got a series you're waiting on each week, you've stopped being a spectator of Korean pop culture and started keeping time with it. Pick one title tonight, read the first three episodes, and see whether two hours vanish on you the way they did on me.