In South Korea, webcomic is not a common term. Instead, Koreans use term 'webtoon', as a combination of 'web+cartoon' for webcomics. Webtoons are highly popular in Korea, for several reasons.
Usually, comics artists create their artwork first for the print version. That has been the way comic book artists of the world producing their works. Or at least, they may draw their comics with the help of monitor and tablets, but they do not publish it online before they hand it over to the publishers.
The system has been quite different, though, in Korea. Korea has had high-speed internet since early nineties, as the government set up the infrastructure for the broadband in those days. Thanks to that, people became used to enjoying online contents with big volumes.
Of course, there has been already a huge comic book industry behind. This manga market had a lot of consumers, who eventually came to settle down on the internet and started enjoying webtoons as well.
There are many online comics in many countries: including the US, France, Korea, and Japan, since the internet has become the most prevalent tool for modern day society. However, where webcomic is popular the most is South Korea. In Japan, the idea of webcomic is online version of published manga. In France, the genre of webcomic is confined to a kind of personal diary. The US web comics are mostly 4-panel structure like newspaper comics.
Korean webtoons have very different features from the others.
- Webtoons are published in a long vertical strip. Taking advantage of the concept Scott McCloud calls the 'unlimited canvas'.
- Are very often in color.
Webtoon artists are hired by the major websites, serializing their comics once or twice a week.
Webtoon is a great make-living means to many Korean manga artists, as there are already too many mangas (manhwa, in Korean term) published out there, and illegal scanned copies of them exist online.
In the big portals' point of view, webtoon is a perfect way to lure people to regularly visit their websites.
Besides, google is not such a powerful search engine in Korea, and a lot of Koreans like to read mangas from the bottom of their hearts. People visit major portals like Naver and Daum on a daily basis, and they get to see their favorite webtoons updated everyday. Korea could be the only country which has a number of dramas, musicals, movies, animations, books based on 'webtoons'. For example, there is a popular webtoon called The Great Catsby serialized through 2005-2010. This was made into a musical in Oct 2010.