Why Webtoon’s Marvel And Disney Expansion Is A Huge Deal
by Tony Thornley
Announced yesterday, Marvel Comics and their corporate parent Disney is bringing over 100 titles to the Webtoon platform in a multi-year deal. This is a massive deal, in multiple ways.
Webtoon is a massive platform. With millions of subscribers, the platform has some of the biggest stories in the comics world today. Lore Olympus, one of their most popular, has over 5.4 million subscribers. DC Comics’ original series Wayne Family Adventures is read exponentially more often weekly than even the biggest Batman title DC Comics publishes.
And DC isn’t the only major US comics publisher to bring titles to Webtoons. IDW has brought Sonic The Hedgehog, Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees, Godzilla and more to the platform, and Dark Horse has both their Cyberpunk 2077 and Avatar stories available.
What Marvel is doing is even bigger though.
DC’s deal brought four original series to Webtoons, but of those, only Wayne Family Adventures is still ongoing. The IDW and Dark Horse are reprinting existing stories in Webtoons’ vertical scroll format, a change that often doesn’t translate.
Marvel and Disney’s deal is a balance of both approaches. It starts with five series from across the Disney universe- the 2022 volume of Amazing Spider-Man from Zeb Wells and John Romita Jr, Jonathan Hickman and company’s Avengers, the recent 2021 volume of Alien from Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Salvador Larroca, 2015’s Star Wars by Jason Aaron and the late John Cassaday, and a manga adaptation of the novel As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale. But the deal also promises to bring original stories to the platform as well.
It’s a balanced approach that gets these stories in front of readers that may have never seen them otherwise. It also gives fans of the multimedia giant an easy outlet to find popular stories featuring their favorite characters- particularly with Avengers: Doomsday and Spider-Man: Brand New Day around the corner for movie audiences. And by bringing originals to the platform- which I guarantee will feature the Spider-family and Avengers- Marvel and Disney will have a great way to deliver original content to an absolutely gigantic audience.
There’s one big area where Marvel could still fall short though.
This is a great way to get stories in front of audiences. But Webtoon is a largely free place to enjoy these stories. An ad for “want to find more, here’s how to find these books” would be easy to place on the final pages of chapters.
Overall though, I’m thrilled to see original content coming to the Webtoons platform, featuring characters we know and love. It’s an exciting moment that could future proof the comics and characters that we all love.
