Abstract
This essay examines the global expansion of the webtoon-anime phenomenon that has quickly become mainstreamed by the 2020 partnership between the American anime streaming giant, Crunchyroll, and the South Korean webtoon platform, Naver-Line Webtoon. Marked specifically by the global simulcasts of the anime adaptations of SIU’s Tower of God (Sin-ui Tap, 2020) and Park Yongje’s The God of High School (Gat Obeu Hai Seukul, 2020), the explosion of webtoon-anime adaptations—conveniently marketed alongside what the streaming service describes as “Crunchyroll Originals”—indicates yet another fraught flashpoint within the tensely bound networks of South Korean creators, Japanese producers, American distributors, and global fans. From a critical Marxian and post-Deleuzian reassessment of the webtoon-anime media ecology through these three texts, this chapter examines what Brian Yecies, Aegyung Shim, Jack (Jie) Yang, and Peter Yong Zhong describe as the emergence of the “Korean Digital Wave” and Naver-Line Webtoon’s “webtoon IP-engine" alongside the works of world film scholars like David Martin-Jones JungBong Choi, and Robert Stam to postulate how the current post-global philosophical troubles of the digital expanse have upended tidy discourses of translinguistic, transnational, and transcultural participatory culture, squarely reestablishing the ideological and transmedial frameworks of these webtoon series. By reading the popular work of South Korean webtoonists SIU and Park alongside an aesthetic and ontological examination of scrolling, screens, and streams, this chapter hopes to explore the philosophical potentials and limitations of their Crunchyroll anime adaptations, and further express a serious interrogation of the emergent webtoon-anime assemblage.
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Notes
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I believe, since even across his English web presence, the author of The God of High School does continue to use his South Korean name as such: Park Yongje (Park, his surname).
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Boyd, D.J. (2022). Crunchyroll and the Webtoon-Image: Reterritorialising the Korean Digital Wave in Telecom Animation’s Tower of God (2020) and MAPPA’s The God of High School (2020). In: Samuel, M., Mitchell, L. (eds) Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_16
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