NETCOMICS

» see netcomics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The vertical scroll comic reached me the way it reached most people outside Korea, which was late and on a phone, sometime in the 2020s, arriving fully formed and already owned by two enormous companies. What I did not know until I went looking is that a Korean publisher operating out of Los Angeles had been selling the same catalog in English, chapter by chapter, on a plain web page, since 2006.

Netcomics was set up in 2005 by Heewoon Chung, with the platform built by Ecomix Media Company in South Korea and the English operation run from California. The first titles went up in the opening months of 2006. The pitch was manhwa for readers who had never been offered any. The American comics shelf at that point meant superheroes or Japanese work in paperback, and Korean work mostly did not appear on it at all.

The business model is the part that dates it and also the part that was years early. You paid to rent or to keep a single chapter, with the price sitting under a dollar, so nobody had to commit to a series they had never heard of. In 2006 most of the industry was still treating a comic on a screen as theft with extra steps.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

The company's own account puts the underlying platform back in 1998 in Korea, with 40,000 volumes of manhwa on it and a million registered readers by that first year. What crossed to the United States in 2006 was that library with translation laid over it, plus a print line, because Netcomics used the creator relationships it already had to put paperbacks on physical shelves as well. It also handled distribution for Aurora Publishing until Aurora closed in april 2010.

Pay by the chapter is now simply how webtoons make money. Naver and Kakao run it as coins or as a waiting period that lets you read free if you are patient enough. Netcomics ran that model on a desktop web page fifteen years earlier, in English, without the one device that makes the transaction small enough to be thoughtless.

~ the funny part ~

A company can be first and still lose on distribution alone. Naver and Kakao built vertical scroll reading into apps and put those apps on every phone in Korea. What they exported as Webtoon and Tapas was a format designed for a thumb rather than for a page you turn. Netcomics kept selling pages. Being nineteen years early stops helping when the last stretch of those years is spent as the small option sitting next to the two largest comics platforms on earth.

The service ended on 29 december 2024, announced about eight weeks ahead, with registrations switched off and coin purchases stopped before the date arrived. netcomics.com is still up, and what it serves is one page of text saying the apps and the web service were terminated that day, adding that the book and webtoon publishing business carries on. The reading stopped. The publishing did not.

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