WEBTOON Unscrolled and the Rise of Printing Webcomics

By Frankie Harnett, Mishelle Kennady, Natalie Klinkenberg, Chloë Marshall

Since 2004, WEBTOON has built an international fanbase of around 72 million people. On 18 November 2021, they took their webcomics one step further, announcing the Wattpad WEBTOON Studio’s launch of their new graphic novel imprint, WEBTOON Unscrolled. Based on WEBTOON’s existing works and creators, Unscrolled was launched by executive editor Bobbie Chase. Having previously headed up similar projects for industry giants, including DC Entertainment, Disney and Marvel, she seemed thrilled to work on a creator-owned imprint celebrating first-time artists.

Originally set to release twelve titles a year, the imprint has exploded. In only two years, it expanded its fanbase and content production to publish over forty titles annually and signed a deal with PRHPS in January. Ashleigh Gardiner, the SVP at Wattpad WEBTOON Studios, described Unscrolled’s artist diversity and audience-led, fan-first content as the future of publishing. Staying true to its WEBTOON roots, the imprint continues to invest strongly in prioritising monetisation opportunities for creators and catering to those left behind by traditional publishing.

One of WEBTOON Unscrolled’s releases is the famous Tower of God by SIU, with 3.6 million subscribers, 1.2 billion views, and an incredible 9.86 rating out of 10 on the platform from just the United States alone. It has over 600 published chapters, and new chapters are out weekly. Due to its long history as a WEBTOON, it has one of the largest readerships and is a leading action genre title. Four print volumes have been released in English. Its success has also warranted a Japanese anime adaptation, with the second season, produced by The Answer Studio, premiering in July 2024. Tower of God is a fantasy world where much of the setting takes place inside a massive structure called the Tower, which has many floors with unique environments. Characters move up the floors to fulfil their desires by taking a test determined by administrators. They are motivated to do so because the Tower can supposedly grant someone whatever they wish. The main protagonist, Bam, is an Irregular who enters the Tower from the outside. Irregulars are special and even considered dangerous because the same rules and authorities restricting Regular Tower residents do not apply to them. The story thus follows Bam and his allies as they attempt to climb the tower whilst revealing its many mysteries.

While graphic novels have been in steady demand for a couple of years in the United States -Publisher’s Weekly stated that “around 45% of all graphic novels sold in the US during 2022 were manga” - webcomics have been a mainstream content source for Korean audiences for years. With the accessibility of their online format, webcomics only continue to grow in global popularity.

Webcomics are considered binge-able since they’re easily accessible on a reader’s phone. Creators get to decide their publishing schedule, and WEBTOON’s paywall and Fast Pass option make bingeing stories much easier for those who can’t wait for the next episode. This is where publishers see the appeal to web-to-print; as Sierra Hahn, Oni Press’ editor-in-chief, stated, “readers want to come back to something they can hold” after bingeing a digital story for a long time. 

An advantage of web-to-print comics is that publishers can view the completed story, which means they can see audience engagement and how successful the webcomic is. The audience is key, as established fandoms are the biggest advantage for web-to-print comics. Fans want to continue supporting their favourite creators, and purchasing bound copies of their favourite webcomic is one way to show that never-ending love. Spike Trotman, an Iron Circus publisher, claimed that webcomics have “an unfair advantage over straight-to-print titles.” With an established fandom, publishers do not need to worry about whether a story will sell or if it’s marketed toward the right audiences because there is an eager audience already on standby.

However, printing a webcomic comes with challenges; it’s not just a question of sectioning up the work and putting it through the printer. Firstly, more technical matters such as screen-to-print colouring and file-type conversions must be considered. Then, the click-through panels or continuous screen scroll of a webcomic, whether vertical or horizontal, leads to questions of ‘pagination’: how the work will be split up on the page. 

This extends beyond formatting manoeuvres to more integral questions of artistry and form, as the activity of reading comics on a screen radically differs from that of flipping through the pages of a physical book. A work of art draws as much from its form (screen, paper, canvas, collage) as it does from its content; indeed, the two are highly co-dependent and co-constructive. For example, Macmillan senior editor Holly West explained that the pacing of a story can be affected when dissecting a continuous succession of panels into discrete pages. We’re talking about the transformation from analogue to digital in a strangely inverse fashion, where analogue is the uninterrupted flow of a webcomic, and digital is the segmentation of the story onto individual pages. 

Nevertheless, artistic and operational challenges aside, WEBTOON’s U.S.-based imprint WEBTOON Unscrolled has fifteen young adult and eleven adult volumes already on sale and six upcoming young adult and five adult volumes. The dynamic nature of this particular publishing model will likely continue to evolve in response to its uniquely self-governed fanbase/readership.