I don’t consider Webtoon the bad guy, here.
Now that I don’t expect any more work from them, I can say that without any conflict of interest…though my NDA still forbids me from getting into some details.
In fact, Webtoon was the source of a windfall I’d never expected. An editor who knew and liked my webcomics had landed there, and he was willing to invest in me with a new series. That series became Traveler, which I’ve already discussed in this space.
I wonder a lot about how we approached Traveler. I wonder if we should’ve started with a series in another genre, or even a set of interlinked series—an idea that was briefly on the table. I wonder if I should’ve invested further into PR just before the series began. I wonder if I should’ve used an art team more familiar with Webtoon. I wonder if I should’ve cut down my word-count: I’m not too talky by comic-book standards, but I am a bit of a chatterbox compared to most Webtoon features.
It’s hard to be sure. My best theory says Traveler fell through the cracks. It didn’t feel quite “old-school webcomic” enough to appeal to my earlier reader base, especially since it was designed to be read on phones, not laptops. And it wasn’t quite new-school enough for Webtoon readers to know what to do with it. Beyond our year-long initial contract, the readership numbers sealed its fate pretty quickly…
But that seemed like a failure Webtoon and I could learn from together, and our editor was willing to try, as was I. I slimmed down my writing style, studied popular genres on Webtoon, and recruited new “Webtoon-native” artists.
I’d once been the new kid doing those “web-comics” the print dinosaurs found so threatening. I was older now but determined not to be the same kind of dinosaur. If Webtoon did things differently than I was used to, that was a learning opportunity. I was willing to go through all kinds of changes as long as we kept true to the core idea.
The core of the newer series, its beating heart, was the love for puzzles and games that I show off here on a regular basis. And my desire to make the GameLit genre a little more cerebral, a little more emotionally well-rounded. My editor, my artist, and I all honored that, jumping through hoop after hoop to get that precious green light.(We were paid to write and rough out one sample story, so there was that.)
We did seem to please the team more with each successive effort. When the final “no” came, I was of course disappointed, but at least I could say we’d done our best.
In fact, we’d done so well that the dismissal made me suspect we were falling prey to outside forces. Aside from pulling up newcomers from its “Canvas” minor leagues, Webtoon seems to be shifting investment away from people like me—back toward overseas studios, where a team of artists can work for the same paycheck that a single artist would ask in the States.
If I’m being honest, my desire to do more Webtoon work evaporated almost immediately after getting that note. I’d worried for a while that it wasn’t gonna happen anyway, but being rejected for not being a studio was freeing. You can’t blame yourself for failing to get a job if it turns out that the job doesn’t actually exist.
To be continued…after an intermission.