Last month I mentioned blogger David Welsh‘s solid manwha (Korean comics) overview for Print magazine. Now the article has made its way online, via BusinessWeek, where you can check it out without plunking down $12.95:
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.
The survey piece includes quotes from Ju-Yuon Lee of Ice Kunion, Heewoon Chung of Netcomics and Tran Nguyen of DramaQueen.
