How Korean Webtoons Invented Vertical Scrolling as a Storytelling Form

Korean comics — manhwa — have a long history distinct from Japanese manga, but they were occupying a similar cultural position in the late 1990s: primarily print publications, serialized in magazines, collected in volumes for purchase. Then the internet arrived, Korean broadband penetration became among the highest in the world, and a group of artists and platforms made a decision that would change how comics are read globally: they moved the format online and redesigned it completely for the new medium.

The crucial innovation was orientation. Print manhwa, like print manga, was designed to be read on a page — discrete bounded spaces of a fixed size. Online, the page boundary becomes arbitrary. You can read in any direction the scroll allows. Korean webtoon creators chose vertical scrolling, and then they built an entirely new visual grammar around what that choice enables.

In a vertically scrolling comic, pacing is controlled not by the page turn — a physical action — but by the scroll — a continuous gesture. This changes the rhythm of reading fundamentally. A dramatic moment in a print comic is staged at the bottom of a right-hand page, so that turning the page reveals the consequence with maximum impact. In a vertical scroll, tension is built by the amount of space between images: a creator who wants the reader to pause before a revelation simply increases the white space before the reveal, slowing the scroll and building anticipation physically. The medium is not neutral; it shapes what kinds of stories can be told effectively.

Korean platforms Naver Webtoon (now Webtoon) and Daum Kakao recognized early that this format had properties that print could not replicate — specifically, that it was native to the smartphone screen. A webtoon reads naturally on a phone held vertically, because the phone's natural orientation and the reading orientation are identical. This alignment between medium and device was a significant competitive advantage that became increasingly important as smartphone penetration spread globally.

By 2014, Webtoon had launched English-language services, and the format began attracting readers who had never read manhwa before. By the early 2020s, "vertical scroll comic" had effectively become a global standard, with American comics publishers experimenting with the format, Japanese companies launching their own vertical scroll platforms, and European artists producing work in the medium. An aesthetic and technical decision made by Korean webcomic creators in the early 2000s had, within twenty years, restructured how a significant portion of global comics was produced and consumed.