In the last year, Korean drama programmes have gained international acclaim. Squid Game, the runaway blockbuster Netflix programme, has had a record-breaking start to 2022, with historic Screen Actors Guild (SAG) nominations and a first-ever Golden Globe triumph (in addition to nominations).
South Korea’s current global success has been fuelled by K-dramas. Webtoons, a sort of digital comic that first appeared in South Korea in the early 2000s, are the source of many of the most popular episodes on Netflix and other streaming services.
Korean webtoons were first developed to lure people to portal sites and to digitise paper comics (known in Korean as “manhwa”). According to The Korea Herald in May 2020, the Korean portal companies Daum and Naver, which each started their own webtoon platforms in 2003 and 2004, respectively, have been topping the webtoon business ever since.
In August 2020, a post on the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism’s website stated that Korean webtoons had the potential to become “the next great genre,” promoting hallyu (or the “Korean wave”), the phenomenon of South Korean culture sweeping the globe.
The programme launched at number one on Netflix in 2020 and quickly rose to the top of the streaming service’s top drama series list in various countries, becoming the first Korean series to crack the top ten in the United States.
The show was rumoured to be renewed for a second season, but Netflix Korea informed South Korea’s Top Star News in October 2021 that “nothing has been determined yet.”
Sweet Home is based on the same-named webtoon that first appeared on WEBTOON, the world’s largest digital comics site, with over 72 million monthly active users worldwide.
WEBTOON was founded in 2004 in South Korea and has since become a global leader in the webcomic business, pioneering the “vertical scroll format” for mobile comics.
WEBTOON began in the United States in 2014, and the network already has users in more than 60 nations, according to the company.
