Hello, welcome to 2026! We begin new year's discussion of the Korean popular contents with a review of a classic Korean webtoon, Subtle Disaster, by Haska Begovic-Nichols. This is the first time this site is uploading a content directly regarding South Korean webtoon, one of the South Korean popular media rapidly gaining global presence since 2010s, along with K-pop, Korean TV dramas and video games.
Ms. Begovic-Nichols studies at University of California, Davis. She is interested in studying East Asian cultures and histories, including history of gender in modern Japan, Korean popular culture and philosophical and intellectual developments of East Asia. As is with contributions from other writers for this site, the following review text is copyrighted by Ms. Haska Begovic-Nichols (© 2026). Written permission must be obtained from her for any quotation or citation of this text, aside from academic citation with proper attribution. Any act of plagiarism will be held liable to the fullest limits of the law. What we usually refer to as “webtoon” is an online form of comics that updates, on average, once a week. The most famous platform for webtoons is WEBTOON (or Line WEBTOON) by Naver. As I understand, just as the Japanese have manga as their own cultural form of “comics,” as defined in Europe and the US, Koreans have manhwa (with the same Chinese characters 漫畵 for these words). In fact, webtoons originated as an effort to revitalize the struggling manhwa industry, specifically launching of the Naver WEBTOON platform in 2004. The earliest versions of webtoons date back to 2000, when Lycos Korea created the Comic Bang, a comics section of their website. However, the idea of a webtoon predates any online platform. Artists have been scanning and uploading their works on personal blogs and websites for years. Line WEBTOON, the international version of WEBTOON, was launched in 2014. Yet, by then NAVER had already ‘officially’ published five hundred and twenty webtoons. Granted, these were primarily intended for domestic readers.
The ‘mainstream’ cultural influence of Naver (and South Korea more generally) has become noticeable in conjunction with the increasing popularity of Kpop and K-culture: PSY’s 2012 song Gangnam Style and hit groups like BTS in the 2010’s and subsequently the international success of such Korean as Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite (2019) as well as such K-dramas as Squid Game (first season in 2021). I speculate that Netflix greatly expanded on the numbers of K-dramas under their possession since Squid Game: in any case, in 2025 they have 402 K-drama series in their roster. All illustrations in the text are credited to Line WEBTOON and SUNGHO AN.
Today more and more international authors rely on the indie production, rather than corporate, sections of Line WEBTOON to globally disseminate them. CANVAS WEBTOON (‘Challenge Cartoon’ in Korean language) is the ‘unofficial’ side of webtoon creation, an open platform, where, within certain bounds (such as regulations of violence and sex for unofficial creators), anyone can produce and publish their own webtoons. As in the case of motion picture industry in the US, these works remain “unrated” but when they become corporate products they receive “ratings” in relation to the suitability for age demographics, and so on. Many of these “unofficial” works have hundreds of thousands of followers. Popular CANVAS authors are often scouted by the companies so that their webtoons could be officially licensed. Thus, CANVAS has been an integral part of the webtoon experience from the beginning. As we write now, plans are underway in 2026 for a WEBTOON creator residency program. Meanwhile, Naver has expanded pathways for creators to receive payment, which they hope will bolster support for new creative talents. It is also worth noting that other IT conglomerates like Kakao have their own webtoon platforms. Kakao’s equivalent of Line WEBTOON is called Tapas: a popular comic Solo Leveling, for instance, is based on the Kakao site.
Due to the growing popularity of other Korean cultural phenomena, many works of manhwa have been translated into English. Conversely, some English webtoons have been translated into Korean for Naver WEBTOON (e.g., Lore Olympus, 2018-2024). Of course, official translations lag behind ‘scantalation’ (fan translations— derived from the word “scan”) in timeliness and topicality. Due to the growing popularity of webtoons, scantalation sites that traditionally hosted manga are now full of manhwa, with an increasing number of manhua (Chinese comics) as well. In a recent CBC interview, Michelle Cho emphasized how subtitling, text-on-screen and translation are becoming art forms in and of themselves, as text and film begin to combine with one another.*
As I have alluded above, there is a lot of crossover, cultural exchange among East Asian societies regarding graphic narrative art. Manhua/Chinese Web-Novel tropes such as ‘Green Tea Bitches’ or ‘White Lotus’ characters have become common tropes in manhwa, especially in the Isekai (異世界Japanese in “otherworld”) genre. While Isekai, Power Fantasy and MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) webtoons dominate the market today, it is potentially beneficial for fans of webtoons like myself to observe how the popular genres have shifted from earlier times. The first time I heard of webtoons was over five years ago, through my ‘artsy’ peers in middle school. At the time, the English Line WEBTOON platform had only a handful of webtoons, and the mix of Korean and English authors was relatively even, although CANVAS was already flourishing. One of the most popular (and oldest) webtoons available at the time was Orange Marmalade by Seokwoo, ** a popular series about teen love and vampires. I initially found it a bit kitschy and reminiscent of the Japanese shojo genre.
Another webtoon reminiscent of Japanese manga art style and plot was Westwood Vibrato, one of the earliest available on the site, released in 2015. However, while some inspiration from manga was obvious in the ideas, attitudes, genres, and art styles, manhwa remain distinctly Korean. The official translation of a webtoon has typically been reliant on the popularity of the webtoon on Naver in Korea, which is why Cheese in the Trap (which has since been adapted into a drama [2010- 2017], Noblesse (2007- 2019), Tower of God (2010- present), among others, were the first to premiere on the site. Interestingly enough, while fantasy/action comics like Tower of God were pivotal to the success of webtoons, the first internationally released ‘batch’ of WEBTOONS had a strong cerebral and philosophical bent, such as Smile Brush (2010), Midnight Rhapsody (2005-2007), and About Death (originally started out in 2014 but reserialized in 2018: it is possible that an even older Korean language version is extant).
This trend continued for the first several years of Line WEBTOON, when the international market was still relatively niche and underdeveloped. The attitudes expressed by many of the artists in these comics are distinctly personal and clearly reflect the author's perspective as well as elements of Korean culture. For instance, for many years the top-ranking webtoons on Line WEBTOON were Lookism and True Beauty, which explicitly dealt with pressures that Koreans, especially adolescents, faced in their daily lives such as bullying and prejudices. These comics enjoyed very long runs: Lookism is presently at well over 500 chapters and has transformed from a critique of high-school bullying into a gangster-fighting comic. However, despite its genre switch, I still feel that mass appeal to foreign audiences has been put aside in favor of personal expression and social consciousness.
In chapter three of Midnight Rhapsody by Wony and Yoonsoo Sim, the main character, a 20-something-year-old Korean anthropomorphic wolf, is dismayed at the state of the education system, as his poor grades taint his learning and hard work. He feels that the value of education is undermined by the importance Koreans put on academic grades. While this criticism could be relevant to most of the industrialized world, the Korean suneung (a perennially controversial, standardized national college entrance exam) makes the focus on grades especially intense. In chapter five, the main character asks how to live a modest life; the ironic answer provided to him is to ‘work like crazy.’
This attitude is emulated again in Subtle Disaster by SUNGHO AN, where the main character (self-reflectively, a webtoon author) is working on a comic titled Lazy but Greedy, the main contention of which is his observation that people have to work so that they could be lazy. The author-within-the-comic insists that the insane lengths that Koreans drive themselves, literally working themselves to death, are for the purpose of earning the right to be lazy. The topic of overwork is especially relevant to webtoon artists. One of the most severe controversies involved the artist of Roxana: The Way to Protect the Female Lead's Older Brother. She claimed that overworking caused her to suffer a miscarriage, while at the same time her Naver editor was pregnant and able to take maternity leave.***
Subtle Disaster is my personal favorite webtoon for a variety of reasons. The high quality of the art is glaringly obvious and the balance between art and blank space on the page is ideal. There are no swaths of white that I often find myself having to scroll down, yet the presentation is open enough that the art and plot are never muddled or overwhelming. The colors are vibrant; each panel looks like a watercolor painting. The characters are diverse in personality and appearance. While some webtoons are criticized for struggling with the ‘same face syndrome,’ that is not the case here. The motion of the characters is also realistic and clear, and the formatting feels as if it would translate impeccably to a movie screenplay. The artist obviously has a clear conception of people moving through space.
Subtle Disaster's narrative is disarmingly simple. A WEBTOON artist moves to the countryside, where his neighbors drive him insane with the noise from adjoining floors (what Koreans call cheung-gan soeum 層間騷音 ). Beyond the comic, it was brought to my attention that this is a problem big enough to have been dealt with in many other media forms. For instance, summer 2025 saw a Korean horror film Noise released (though this has a heavier supernatural horror bent), and a black comedy-thriller Wall to Wall debuted at Netflix in the same year. This is likely due to the high-density living of apartment complexes in South Korea and has become a growing problem in all areas of the world where rapid urbanization is taking place. The examples of popular media taking up the neighbor noise problem outside Korea include the 2020 UK series At War with the Noise Next Door. Through the medium of webtoons, then, global issues are being recognized and addressed in ways that actually resonate with international audiences, not just Koreans.
By stripping down the plot, the author of Subtle Disaster creates the ideal stage for the characters to play out a bona fide tragedy. The characters take precedence over the narrative conventions. The protagonist, Songshin Ha, is a laid-back guy. He wants a simple life, and he seems to be content with a burgeoning career as a webtoon artist, a girlfriend, and a new apartment. His one major ‘flaw’ is his noise sensitivity. His neighbors slowly turn him from a reasonable character to an angry and petty person. Because of a violent conflict with his upstairs neighbor, he loses his job. His sanity also begins to slip, and he hears a ‘tick-tock’ noise constantly. This particular noise became noticeable after a news report about a nearby bombing. The symbolism is apt; his life is indeed becoming a ticking time bomb.
Despite Songshin being the main character (abbreviated as MC), he actually is not in the apartment complex for the majority of the comics. As things escalate, he finishes his lease while living in a cheap hostel to avoid the chaos. Even though this story is from his perspective, he is not exactly always the center of attention. The comic generally follows him, but the reader is also given a partially omniscient POV. The webtoon's author, SUNGHO AN, clues us in to some of the activities of the other characters but deliberately leaves other parts out. The effect is to build suspense and ensure that the reader is surprised. Because of these narrative strategies, we know, for example, that the girl next door was the culprit behind the paint splashed on the door, yet we do not know if she was actually abusing her dogs, even though this is suspected by other characters as well as us, the readers. We discover the truth about the latter alongside our MC.
Songshin’s prolonged absence sets up an alibi for him from the viewpoint of readers, exonerating him from becoming a perpetrator. Among all the characters, he best approximates, at least to me, a representation of an ordinary person. He gets angry, but not irrationally; he’s empathetic, but not obsessively; he is smart but not cunning, and so on. The other central characters are his neighbors in the apartment complex, as well as the security guard. Each is referred to for the majority of the story by their unit number or in relation to Songshin. The family upstairs (with the father that Songshin had a scuffle with) comes with two unruly children who make lots of noise. The wife is a strict and grouchy stay-at-home mom. The husband is overworked and resentful.
The security guard, on the other hand, is divorced but cares deeply for his children. He seems to love the latter dearly, but they have little to no time or interest in a close relationship with him. The reason for this is hinted at as financial in origin. He has only enough money to send them bags of rice. His nature is subdued; he seems down on his luck and tired, yet he is almost endlessly patient and empathetic to the residents who place heavy demands on him.
The next-door neighbor is a young woman with three dogs. It is implied early on that she comes from a wealthy family, and her character is both the catalyst and the kindling for the imminent disaster. She is portrayed as unstable from the get-go, as she swings around a metal pipe wildly; she’s outgoing and friendly to the MC, yet her volatile nature seems out of place. She comes from wealth, yet she does not seem comfortable in her skin. She seems listless and bored, ready to agitate drama. When she catches a kid from one of the apartments drawing on the main character’s door, she runs him off, and then splashes paint all over, inflaming conflict between the MC and another neighbor. After this, she offers to help him get ‘revenge.’
She uses the tenants of the apartment complex as figurines in a child’s make-believe game, without fully coming to terms with the serious consequences it will have. For example, when the kid catches her putting paint on the MC’s door, she defends her actions using an analogy of boxing and other physical fights to portray them as a part of aggressive game. She admits that she wants the “game” or “drama” as we readers see it, to drag out, and she gets to create rules for it, as if it is a role-playing game, and “drive it into people’s minds, step-by-step, one punch at a time, until they feel it in their bones.”
I find it intriguing that the webtoon’s seemingly deplorable characters, such as the girl next door, are actually compelling. The wealth divide between the privileged girl who loves to instigate drama and other residents of the apartment, for instance, is very obvious. When the cows from a neighboring farm begin to face issues caused by the stress of the noise, there follows a lawsuit. The fees of the lawsuit become a fodder for another game, in which the loudest household has to pay the most.
This idea was also proposed by the girl next door. She wants to see rivalries, alliances, and betrayals played out among the residents. She behaves like a bored demigod who wants to test out the limits of human complacency and emotional responses.
Her actions push the plot around like she is authoring a literary piece.
An important caveat to this game she wants to play is that, if there is tampering with the decibel meters (there is a subplot about purchasing a rather expensive machine that measures the level of noise), fixing the noise-related data, and cheating with equipment, the culprit will pay the full cost. In this scheme, kindness and loneliness of the security guard become his weakness. He ends up helping the single mother cheat. When it all comes undone, he is left to pay the debt himself. The residents raise his meager salary slightly to help pay for it, but treat him all the worse for it. The poor guard is eventually driven to suicide.
The girl next door illustrates what total boredom can do to a resourceful person without purpose or lacking meaning of life. She is rich but had an unsuccessful career as an artist (there is a hint that she herself is a victim of the patriarchy of the art world). Her parents abandoned her due to the anger she had displayed over her failure. I would even accept that her anger is justified, but she remains uninterested in how her anger affects other people. In fact, she even seemed genuine in her urge to remedy the situation at the outset. Yet she lacks restraint, and soon enough her manipulative streak gets the better of her.
Still, I believe her character, rather than being a cliché ‘manipulative evil’ archetype, is instead representative of the consequences of someone with nothing to lose, no hopes and dreams, no stress (except for the internal one not beholden to societal pressures), too much money, and endless boredom. Initially, it seems as if she will be a love interest for our MC. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the layers of her character, her independent motives, and manipulative qualities. If our protagonist is the reactant to the spiraling disaster, then she is surely the catalyst that sends everything hurtling towards it at breakneck speed.
The apartment complex is an ideal stage for this (a beaker for chemical reactions, if you will) as its liminal nature accentuates the anxious undertones of the plot. I consider it liminal because it is on the border of society and wilderness, both literally and figuratively. The location is tucked in the hills, forming a physical boundary between the residents and the rest of society, but it is still an urban complex, not tents in the woods.
The author points out that, rather than each resident accepting that her or she has had his or her share of responsibility for the ensuing chaos, the residents collectively accept terms of the “noise game.” Like many members of our current industrialized societies, the residents shirk responsibility for their actions. Hence more strife is created, as people begin to cheat and lie to avoid paying the noise fees. When Songshin is at his most peaceful in the webtoon, he’s living with almost nothing at the hostel, the antithesis of greed and materialism.
By undermining conventions of storytelling, developing a simple premise as well as a colorful cast of characters, the author creates a simple and beautiful webtoon with a poignant personal slant. Could we even infer at this point that she, not simply MC, could also be a reflection of the author? After all, she pits different characters against each other just to see what happens. What is writing if not that? Her creativity, when not in use for art, becomes destructive. The subtle focus on the girl next door implies that she is the camouflaged authorial ego, surreptitiously inserted into the narrative. While the “Self-Insert” trope is heavily criticized by webtoon readers for producing ‘Mary Sue’ characters and being self-indulgent, the girl next door is the one whose machinations create the drama, the “story,” of the webtoon itself.
I think it is more interesting and profound for the author to acknowledge the worst parts of his nature in this way. Songshin is “innocent” but he simply observes, while the girl next door is “guilty” but she instigates, acts on the others consciously, and drives the plot.
In the final twist, the terrorist introduced in the first chapters blows up the apartments after moving into Songshin’s old unit, after having been driven mad by noise. After hearing the news, Songshin sits, facing a window and looking out at the world, and places a single earbud in. He again hears a tick-tock. This is crucial for two reasons. Firstly, it shows how the people at the apartment complex, despite all that has come of their chaos, continue to repeat past mistakes, even as the toll on quality of life grows. Secondly, as Songshin shuts the news article/his computer and stares out of the window, the scene emphasizes that Songshin has detached from that part of himself and his past.
Presumably, he has grown as a person. However, he clearly carries with him the residual trauma from his experience. What lessons has he really learned about himself? Even when situations become completely abject and beyond one’s control, he/she/they can still exercise agency and face up to his/her/their accountability. For Songshin, perhaps “dropping out” was an option that allowed him to take responsibility. This is a hard question, among other hard-hitting questions, that I was left with, after reading this disturbing but compelling webtoon, Subtle Disaster.
