Genres
Manhwa
The general Korean word for comics; outside Korea, the name for Korean comics specifically, and the medium the webtoon grew out of.
Manhwa is the general Korean term for comics and print cartoons; outside Korea it usually refers to South Korean comics specifically. It is a cognate of Japanese manga and Chinese manhua, all translating roughly as "impromptu sketches", and print manhwa reaches back to woodcuts of 1908. The modern story is digital: after South Korea's late-1990s economic crisis, most manhwa moved online in the early 2000s. The webtoon, a portmanteau of "web" and "cartoon" first coined in August 2000, became the dominant form: built for vertical scrolling on a smartphone, usually in color, and Naver's global WEBTOON service reportedly reached 55 million monthly users across 60 countries.
For prose writers this is the medium Korean web fiction grew up beside: Korean web novels share the episodic, phone-first reading culture and the drama and film adaptation pipeline, where successful manhwa such as Full House and Princess Hours made the jump.