So what's the production set up of the big webtoons?

[aqua03]

This has been something I've been thinking about for a while: What exactly is the production pipeline for the big premium webtoons you see on Tapas and Webtoons? (Tower of God, God of High School, Those ones on Tapastic I keep forgetting the name of.... Etc.)

I've always been fascinated by the production and behind the scenes of media for most of my life (Video games, film, animation, television, etc.) and with Webtoons/Webcomics being a big thing, I've always been super curious about how Webtoons are made and picked up by the publishers.

How are they produced and pitched? How long to they spend in preproduction and are they made by a team of writers and artist or just one or two people? How do they get picked up by Tapas and Webtoons to become premium? Are they published independently and then picked up (and possibly rebooted with more artists for higher quality and quicker production?) or are they pitched directly to the online publishers? I'm pretty sure I have other questions as well, but I can't quite think of them at the moment.

So hopefully we can use this topic to open up some conversations and answer some general questions regarding how our favorite comics are written and maybe provide some inspiration for future artists out there possibly.

Thanks and I look forward to hearing the answers.

[hakei]

I'm not sure about all of them but from what I've seen of Korean webtoons process:

Generally, newbie Korean webtoons start out from Naver Webtoon's equivalent of Canvas and if popular enough, get picked up by either Naver itself or by another webtoon company like Daum/Kakao or Lehzin. But if you're an already established webtoon artist working with the company's editor, I think you can pitch to your editor some new story ideas and they can decide which ones they're interested in seeing more of. For example, the creator God of High School had published other stories before making GoHS.

There's usually a team or a studio creating the big, popular webtoons — the main artist and a few assistants helping out with character shading, backgrounds, etc. And don't forget that unlike in the West, webtoon is a well-established industry in Korea with college courses/cram schools.... and tons of fierce competition (as expected from the country that created the scrolling webcomic format).

And of course, if the work gets popular enough in Korea, it gets translated to other languages.

[aqua03]

Ah, that's pretty neat. Thanks for the insight into part of the creative process of webtoons.