If you watch Korean dramas regularly, you have probably seen the phrase “based on a webtoon” many times. The genres can be completely different. A workplace drama, zombie series, school-action story, romance, medical drama, or fantasy may all have started as digital comics.
Sweet Home, All of Us Are Dead, Hellbound, and many other Korean series reached television and streaming audiences after first finding readers in webtoon form. Netflix itself now regularly introduces Korean series by mentioning the webtoons they came from.
For me, what makes this interesting is how different the starting point looks from the comics I remember growing up with.
When I was young, comics meant paper books and neighborhood manhwabang, or comic rental shops. Now a story can begin as a vertical comic read on a phone and later appear as a large-budget K-drama on a global streaming service. So why have Korean webtoons become such a common source for dramas?
From Neighborhood Manhwabang to Webtoons
My childhood memories of comics have little to do with smartphones. Neighborhood comic shops had shelves packed with worn paper books, and people could sit there reading for hours. I still remember the particular atmosphere of some of those places: instant cup ramen, old books, and cigarette smoke mixed together in the air.
Comics did not always have a prestigious image in Korea. For older generations, they were often treated as something children wasted time on rather than serious culture. Korean comics also went through periods of strict censorship and social criticism. But people kept reading them.
The bigger change came when the internet became part of everyday life. Instead of going to a rental shop, readers could follow serialized comics on a computer. Korean portals built dedicated digital-comic services in the early 2000s, and WEBTOON says its platform began in Korea in 2004. Today, the company also operates TV, film, and publishing businesses built around digital-comic IP.
Smartphones later made the format even easier to consume. Vertical scrolling fit naturally on a phone screen, and a webtoon could be read on a commute, during a break, or before going to sleep. Still, I would not say smartphones created webtoons. Korean webtoons were already developing in the PC internet era. Smartphones simply made the format much more convenient and helped turn it into an everyday habit for even more readers.
Why Are Webtoons So Attractive to Drama Producers?
The most obvious advantage is that the story already exists.
A successful webtoon comes with characters, a world, major plotlines, and often a large group of readers who have already reacted to it over months or years. For a drama producer, that is different from starting with a completely unknown idea.
There is also a visual advantage. A novel gives filmmakers words, while a webtoon already gives them faces, costumes, locations, expressions, and key scenes in visual form. That can help producers imagine how a story might work on screen. But I would not call a webtoon a ready-made drama storyboard.
A vertical comic and a live-action television series work very differently. The timing of a reveal, the length of a scene, the number of characters, and even the way emotion is shown may need to change completely once actors, dialogue, music, and real locations are involved.
The business side matters too. A popular webtoon may already have a recognizable title and an existing fan base before casting is even announced. WEBTOON openly treats film and television adaptation as part of its wider IP ecosystem, so screen adaptation is no longer an unusual second life for a comic. That gives producers a useful starting point, but it does not guarantee a successful drama.
A Good Webtoon Does Not Automatically Become a Good Drama
Whenever a well-known webtoon adaptation is announced, casting usually becomes one of the first debates. Readers may have looked at the same drawn character for years, so they already have a strong idea of what that person should look and feel like. When an actor is announced, reactions can immediately divide into “perfect casting” and “this is nothing like the original.” But visual similarity is only one part of adaptation.
A webtoon can run for dozens or even hundreds of episodes. A drama has a limited number of episodes and has to build its own rhythm. Supporting characters may disappear, several characters may be combined, relationships may change, and storylines may be moved forward or removed entirely.
All of Us Are Dead is a useful example. Netflix’s own comparison of the original webtoon and the television series shows that the adaptation changed character emphasis, relationships, and parts of the plot rather than simply reproducing the panels exactly.
I actually think this is one of the interesting parts of watching an adaptation. Someone who knows the webtoon may spend the whole drama wondering why a scene was changed. Someone who has never read the original simply sees a television story. Satisfying both groups cannot be easy.
If producers change too much, longtime readers may feel that the original has been ignored. But if they copy everything too literally, scenes that worked in drawings can become awkward when real actors perform them. A good adaptation therefore seems less about copying the webtoon faithfully and more about knowing what needs to stay and what has to change for another medium.
That is true beyond webtoons as well. I had similar thoughts while watching the Korean remake of Even If This Love Disappears Tonight, where the question was not simply whether the Korean version reproduced its source but what it changed in order to become its own film.
“Webtoon Adaptation” Is Not a Genre
One reason webtoon adaptations keep appearing is that webtoons themselves are not one type of story. There are workplace stories, romance, horror, fantasy, school dramas, crime stories, medical series, action thrillers, and everyday slice-of-life comics. Calling something a “webtoon drama” tells you where the source material came from, not what kind of drama it will be.
A series such as All of Us Are Dead uses a webtoon as the source for a zombie story. The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call comes from a medical webtoon. Bloodhounds comes from an action webtoon. The stories have little in common beyond their original medium. Netflix’s current catalogue alone shows how widely webtoon-derived productions now spread across genres.
The process can also move in both directions from the viewer’s perspective. Existing webtoon readers may follow a story onto television, while someone who discovers the drama first may later look for the original comic.
That relationship between platforms is probably more important than claiming that the webtoon format itself has some automatic advantage over novels, manga, or original screenplays.
Webtoon Adaptations Are Still Everywhere in 2026
The flow of Korean webtoons into television is still easy to see in 2026. Netflix released Teach You a Lesson, based on Chae Yong-taek’s webtoon Get Schooled, in June, followed later that month by Agent Kim Reactivated, adapted from Manager Kim by writer Toy and illustrator Jeong Jong-taek. Both are recent examples of how Korean webtoons continue to move from online platforms to major streaming productions.
The two dramas are also very different. Agent Kim Reactivated is built around a seemingly ordinary father and office worker whose hidden past as a special agent returns when his daughter goes missing. Teach You a Lesson takes place in a fictional school system where a government bureau intervenes in severe cases of school violence.
The fact that both came from webtoons is less interesting to me than the fact that such different stories can travel through the same pipeline.
A comic first finds an audience online. A production company sees potential in the characters or premise. Actors and directors reinterpret it for television. Then people in countries where the original Korean webtoon may never have been widely known encounter the story through streaming. That is a fairly ordinary process now, which may be the clearest sign of how much the Korean comic industry has changed.
From Paper Comics to Streaming Screens
When I think about the old manhwabang I remember from childhood, it feels very far removed from the way people consume Korean comics today. The books were physical, the shops smelled of ramen and cigarette smoke, and nobody was talking about global IP strategies. A comic was simply something you went somewhere to read or borrow.
Paper comics did not disappear just because webtoons became popular, and webtoons are not automatically better than printed comics. They are simply another way to tell and distribute stories. What changed dramatically was how many places a story could go next.
People kept making stories, the way we read them changed, and the number of screens those stories could reach became much larger. That is probably why “based on a webtoon” now feels like such a familiar phrase at the beginning of a K-drama.
And once that webtoon becomes live action, there is another layer for international viewers to notice: the relationships, housing, workplaces, and social signals that may not be obvious from subtitles alone. I cover some of those details separately in my guide to K-Drama Cultural Codes.
About the Author 🇰🇷
I live in South Korea and write about the small details of Korean life and culture that I experience and observe firsthand.
English is my second language, so I sometimes use tools such as Gemini and Google Translate to help with translation and editing. The experiences, observations, opinions, and cultural perspectives in my articles are my own, and I personally review and edit every article before publishing it.
My goal with Korea Core Info is simple: to share everyday Korea from a local perspective and help international readers discover things they might not always find in a typical travel guide.
I hope my stories and guides help you understand Korea a little better — not just as a place to visit, but as a place where people live their everyday lives.