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One of the rapidly growing media fields in twenty-first-century Korea is web graphic narratives. Webtoon (wept’un), which was coined in Korea to refer to web graphic narratives, has been developed not only as an artistic form of comics optimized for screens in the digital era but also as a system of cultural production, distribution, consumption, and participation. It has developed utilizing various potentials that the digital platform offers, such as open solicitation, (partial) free web/mobile distribution, active communication between readers and producers through comment and recommendation systems, profit from advertisement and page viewing, transmedia production, and the incorporation of multiple media functions. Webtoon as a new cultural medium is thus inseparable from its platform and is organically tied to its distinctive platform ecology, which is different from those that other (global) mega platforms create. In this talk, I discuss the ways media platforms on which the webtoon occupies a central place function and the ways webtoon’s relationship with those platforms affect the fields of other art forms.

Heekyoung Cho is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature and Adjunct Associate Professor in Slavic at the University of Washington. She is the author of Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature (2016), and the editor of The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature (2022). Her articles discuss topics on translation and the creation of modern fiction, translation and censorship, serial publication, world literature, and webcomics. Her current research focuses on seriality in cultural production in both old and new media, including digital serialization and transmedial production, as well as graphic narratives and media platforms.

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