Genres and Hits

Chapters 3 and 4 explained the platforms and the format. This chapter turns to what is on them. It takes six titles that Wikipedia documents in some detail, groups them by the kind of story they tell, and reads what the articles claim about their success. The aim is to show how a hit is described and what those descriptions leave out, and no ranking of the titles is intended.

Six Titles at a Glance

The table lists seven because the last two are so thinly covered that I count them as a pair of examples, not full cases.

What the Titles Show

Genres overlap

Each article places its title in one kind of story, but the plots cross lines. Lookism, the article says, starts as a story about appearance and then "changes from problems of being ugly to showing the dark side of Korean society and then slowly to Hyung Seok fighting crime". True Beauty's article says its heroine lives "in a society where people are judged based on their physical appearance". Two of the six open on a young person bullied for how they look. I read that as one theme the articles show, and I make no claim that it is typical of the medium.

Weekly rhythm, at last

Chapter 4 could not source a release schedule. The True Beauty article gives one: "The comic updates every Wednesday." The Lookism article says it "was first published weekly". These are two examples of weekly release, which is not the same as showing it is the rule.

Some hits begin as novels

The Solo Leveling article says the story began as "a South Korean fantasy web novel written by Chugong", serialised on KakaoPage from 25 July 2016 and "later published by D&C Media", and that the webtoon, "illustrated by Jang Sung-rak (Dubu)", began on 4 March 2018. So a "webtoon" can be a comic adaptation of a prose web novel, with a different creator drawing it. The Webtoon article's see-also list names "Web novels in South Korea" as a related topic.

Titles run for years, and the labels vary

Tower of God has run since 2010 and still had new volumes in 2026 by the article's count. Sweet Home ran for about three years. The Tower of God article calls it "a South Korean manhwa released as a webtoon", which fits Chapter 1: the same work is called manhwa and webtoon in one sentence.

How the Articles Measure Success

What the Articles Don't Settle

• Which of these titles was "the biggest" in any year.
• How many Korean readers each had, because the figures given are for English-language versions.
• Whether the genre labels come from the creators, the platforms, the readers or the article's editors.
• For Misaeng and Yumi's Cells, anything about the webtoons themselves beyond the fact that they exist.

Reading a Claim About a Hit

1. What is counted? Views, likes, subscribers and ratings are different things.
2. Which version and market? An English-version count is not a Korean count.
3. When? A figure "as of" a date is a snapshot.
4. Whose phrase? "Cultural phenomenon" is a description; a rights sale announced by the buyer is a claim by an interested party.
5. Which medium? A TV series' ratings tell you about the series and not about the webtoon.

Exercises

Next chapter: From Page to Screen, which covers how webtoons are adapted for television and film and what the sources say about how that changed the industry.