I'd never heard of webtoons before Andrew's post. I hate reading anything on a phone; just a grumpy old fart. Anyway I popped over to the French site to check it out. My first impression was negative. I sampled a realistic-style webtoon that turned out to be a horror story which unrolled in an excruciatingly slow fashion. The art was in digital manga/whatever style with all its deficits. BGs cheated out with effects lines and fancy Photoshop gradations, generic manga-style character design. I quit after half the first episode. Then I tried "La Vie en Grey", an autobiographical story of a young woman who moved to Paris with neither a job nor an understanding of French. It's drawn in a crude cartoony style but it's funny and engaging. I'm sticking with it.
"La Vie en Grey" seems the perfect sort of story for this weird comics format. It isn't a graphic narrative, it's a narrated slide show. The incidents and clever dialogue are what draws you in. Really, you could get the whole thing without the art. It's fun though to see occasional photographs of the real-life settings.
At a quick glance, the thing that most puts me off is that virtually all the series, except for those drawn in funky cartoon styles, are in the @#!$%&@@! manga style. I discovered Japanese manga back in the early 70s, at a Japanese grocery store in Seattle. Nobody, but nobody, was into Japanese comics back then. Had I any sense I might have parlayed my early knowledge into a Grand Old Man position like Fred Patten's. For several years I was crazy about manga. I bought tons of Shonen Jump and Shonen Sunday. I puzzled my way through "Ashita no Joe," "Lone Wolf and Cub," "Lupin III" and "The Crimson Bowler." I practiced drawing "Japanese style." I was a rabid fan of the handful of anime shows on TV--Speed Racer, of course, but also 8 Man, Gigantor, Kimba, Astro Boy, Raideen. I tried unsuccessfully to learn Japanese. After about five years of this I burnt out on it. The storytelling tricks that at first seemed dynamic and unique were used over and over. The characters all started to look the same. I'd never imagined there could be a more oppressive "national style" than the Marvel Comics house style, but here it was.
I know there are good stories out there, but there are thousands of schoolgirl stories, dystopian societies, neo-Imperial militarist science fantasies, samurai stories, demon stories, sex comedies. Each differs a tiny bit from the others, but sorting through them is too much for this old grump. I am quite aware that the world belongs to manga/anime. That's partly why I hang out here.
Anyway, I may look for more webtoons despite the unappealing format, until I burn out on them, too. I kinda wonder though how "some creators can earn $10,000 a month" off these things.
