‘Hellbound’ first appeared as webtoon

Netflix’s most-watched series in late November, ‘Hellbound’, is making a splash on TV, but it first appeared on much smaller screens as an online comic, or webtoon, optimized for smartphones.

The webtoon format, which began in Korea two decades ago, has shaken up content creation for the movie industry around the globe.

With relatively few overhead costs, webtoons have become a gold mine for tens of thousands of visual stories, with a growing number of adaptations on streaming services such as Netflix, Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus. And readership for webtoons themselves has become increasingly global.

“If a drama or movie fails, a bunch of people are in the red so they can’t experiment in various ways. But here, when we fail, we fail alone. So, we can experiment however we want,” said Choi Gyu-seok, the artist and co-creator of the ‘Hellbound’ webtoon.

Each series usually has weekly updates, increasing the amount of material to draw from.

“In a month or two, I made about three or four times the amount of money I could earn a year,” Hellbound’s Choi said about an adaptation of a previous webtoon.

“It gave me freedom so I didn’t have to immediately begin the next work,” he added.