On the screen is the Korean comic “I Level Up Alone”
Ditto, line: wake up
Because of Korean comics, Japanese people can’t even eat ramen at noon – everyone is holding their mobile phones to read comics, and the efficiency of eating is significantly reduced.
Once upon a time, the picture of the bald uncle holding “Youth JUMP” on the subway is a lovely scene unique to Japan. Now, my post-00 friend Xiao Zhi, who lives in Tokyo, told me that such scenes are becoming rarer and rarer.
“Everyone is using their mobile phones. My friends are watching PICCOMA or LINE manga.”
These two are all comic apps operated by Korean companies.
when kpoptelevisionWhen the drama hits, the Japanese don’t worry, when the Korean wave hits in the music, the Japanese don’t worry, when the Korean wave hits again in the movie, the Japanese still don’t worry, because they have absolute confidence in themselves. Cultural Heights.
But this time, Japanese netizens are really panicked:
“Is Japan’s last fortress, manga, also killed by South Korea?”
“Watching Korean vertical screen comics on PICCOMA, my feeling is: #Japan is over.”
This feeling is like Americans suddenly discovering that Hollywood audiences are watching Indian movies, leaving Marvel and DC aside.
They couldn’t understand it intellectually, and couldn’t accept it emotionally. They were extremely afraid, for fear that this time Korean netizens could justify laughing at the Japanese:
“Manga culture is Korean!”
Japanese netizens: Japanese people like to read Korean comics so much, they will be laughed at by Koreans, they will say “stupid Japanese just pay for it” and “comic culture is Korean”!
In the eyes of the adherents of Japan’s traditional “home art”, Korean comics are like third-rate surprise readings from street stalls. , is useless.
“Compared with ordinary comics, watching Korean vertical-screen comics is like watching TV, and you can’t get into your head at all.”
“Can this also be called a comic? Even the beauty of the storyboard is gone.”
“If it turns into this kind of cartoon in the future, then I can’t accept it too much.”
Everyone is embarrassed to publicly admit that they are addicted to Korean comics, because it is like someone else is watching “Dream of Red Mansions”.
But the numbers don’t lie.
Korean comics are surpassing Japanese comics and become the most profitable existence on the Japanese mobile Internet.
APP Annie, a data research agency, released the “2021 Global Mobile User Expenditure APP Ranking” this year.
The well-known apps on the list are all old acquaintances. The top five are TikTok, YouTube, Tinder, Disney+ and Tencent Video. All of them are well-known and their businesses are spread all over the world.
But the sixth place is somewhat unexpected. This is an APP that no one has heard of except the Japanese. It is called PICCOMA.
PICCOMA is a Korean company, but unlike the top 5 in the global business list, it is only on the shelves in Japan, and it has become the sixth most profitable app in the world only by paying for it from Japanese users.
In 2021, there will be more than 90,000 novels and comics on the PICCOMA platform, most of which are popular Japanese works such as “Curse Back to War”.
But these popular Japanese works are not PICCOMA’s biggest cash cow.
Last year, PICCOMA earned 722.7 billion won (about 3.7 billion yuan) in revenue, half of which came from 1,200 “special comics” in 90,000 works.
The vast majority of these “special comics” are Korean works.
For example, the master Huadan “I Level Up Alone” was adapted from a novel by Korean writer Chugong and written by Korean cartoonist DUBU. During the serialization period, subscriptions in Japan were recorded, exceeding 100 million yen per month.
“PICCOMA BEST OF 2021” selected based on popularity Besides, all are from Korea.
The mouth is disgusting, but the body of the Japanese reader is very honest.
Thanks to Japanese readers, PICCOMA will be listed soon
So why do Japanese who grew up reading Japanese comics suddenly fall in love with Korean comics?
Holding this simple question, a week after downloading PICCOMA, I found the answer.
Rather than saying that the Japanese fell in love with Korean comics, it is better to say that the Japanese fell in love with vertical screen comics.
If you have seen the Korean horror comic “Cosmetic Fluid” that was popular in the circle of friends a few years ago, then you can definitely understand what a vertical screen comic is.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen it, don’t be curious to search, it’s really scary.
To briefly explain, vertical screen manga is a comic genre specially created for smartphones. It is usually full-color, and the storyboard movement is simple and clear, and there is no horizontal span, which is suitable for reading with a mobile phone.
Compared with traditional paper comics, just like the difference between short videos on mobile phones and big-screen movies, because of the different sizes of the “canvas”, it is destined to form different creative rules.
The ruler is long and the inch is short. There is no difference between Tiaoman and paper comics, but as far as the experience of the mobile terminal is concerned, Tiaoman is a dimensionality reduction blow to a tank against a traditional comic.
How bad it is to look at traditional comics on mobile phones, let me show you a picture and experience it for yourself.
A page of comics that is usually placed in a B5 format magazine is forced into a small mobile phone screen.
When reading a page of comics, the fingers are so busy that they are so busy, double-click to zoom in to see the lines, and slide left and right to watch the storyboards. Lost looking at it.
As for the vertical screen, you only need to “swipe down” this action.
When encountering a multi-page screen, it is even more incomprehensible
In a crowded subway, or in a cramped table fight, would you rather choose the troublesome traditional manga or the simple manga? The answer is beyond doubt.
This is the reason why Japanese people fall in love with Korean comics – Korean comics are vertical screen comics suitable for reading on mobile phones.
5chan: The content of Tiaoman is specially customized for mobile phones, so it is very convenient to read. I used to want to watch One Piece and the like on my mobile phone, but the text is small and dense, and it is too tiring to read.
Friends who have been reading comics over the years must have noticed a trend. On Chinese comic apps, most of the new works are strip comics. Even if you still insist on the traditional grid-style storyboard, it must be a full-color and clear large frame, which must be easily understood by mobile phone readers.
The same goes for Korean comics.
As the saying goes, the boat is small and easy to turn around. There is no deep accumulation of paper comics. On the contrary, in the era of smart phones, South Korea quickly found a comic routine suitable for smart phones and carried it forward.
And now, these routines are counterattacking the “manga ancestral court” Japan.
Like “Under One”
As an advanced country in comics, Japan is actually the first country to experience the inconveniences of electronic paper comics.
As early as 2013, Miyuki Kitamuro, editor-in-chief of the Japanese comico website, proposed to call cartoonists to draw a new type of cartoon that “can be read vertically” in line with the electronic age.
If Kitamuro’s initiative is successful, it is almost certain that Japan will never give Korean comics an opportunity today.
But unfortunately, it is the deep background that pulls Japan’s hind legs, and the Japanese comics industry refuses to make changes for the new medium.
“This is a blasphemy against manga!”
Bei Shi still remembers how angry comic fans and cartoonists were when she advocated on the street. They took the flyer from Bei Shi, pouted, and threw the flyer into the trash in front of her.
“The sense of speed that lattice storyboards should have, there is no Korean comics at all, and it seems that there is very little information. I really don’t see anything interesting.”
This is the stubbornness of the manga industry and the epitome of the entire Japanese society.
existprevious articleWe talked here, Japan’s level of digitalization, in the words of its own parliamentarians, is “at least 10 years behind the world”.
The proud “stick to tradition” of the Japanese has now become a curse on the digital road.
The stubborn Japan just missed the chance to lead the world again.
In the next 10 years, South Korea and China started secretly on the comics, while the Japanese manga industry was still slowly walking the old road of decades – first serialized in paper magazines, then published in a single book, and if famous, then electronically , animation.
The representative of traditional manga magazine “Shonen Jump”
The old system gave the Japanese manga industry a long-term sense of security, but recently, this sense of security has begun to fail, and they regret it.
Changes in water temperature are gradual, and drowning is instantaneous.
A Japanese comic copyright agent suddenly discovered that the ever-selling Japanese comics could not be sold anymore:
“I took out the serialized work of a popular Japanese magazine, but the Chinese comic platform refused to pay because it is not an online comic.”
Japanese readers, silently leaving traces of krypton gold to Korean comics
If you lose to Tiaoman externally, you also lose to Tiaoman internally.
According to data from the Japan Publishing Research Institute, in 2019, Japanese electronic comics overtook paper comics for the first time, accounting for 52.1% of the market share.
Since then, the market share of electronic comics has risen rapidly. By 2021, it has reached 411.4 billion yen, with a market share of more than 60%.
Mobile phones have become the most important comic reading scene.
Blue is comic magazine, red is comic book, green is electronic comic, purple is the whole comic market
When reading comics on mobile phones became the mainstream, the comics for mobile phones naturally defeated traditional comics and grabbed the attention of readers.
PICCOMA, which has a lot of Korean resources, is like a rocket. With revenue of 6.2 billion yen in 2018, 13.4 billion yen in 2019, 37.6 billion yen in 2020, and 69.5 billion yen in 2021, banknotes are the most untruthful.
The Japanese comics industry suddenly discovered that South Korea, which was once looked down upon, has hit its doorstep, and Japan has overslept in this tortoise and hare race.
A sudden awakening, this year, Shueisha, Shogakukan, Kodansha, and the old manga publishers hurriedly started action.
Shogakukan cooperated with Bandai Company to produce the online variety show “TOON GATE”, and offered 3 million yen as a reward for signing a serial contract with LINE MANGA, attracting amateurs to create comics.
Kazuhiko Torishima, the former editor-in-chief of “Juvenile JUMP” and the legendary comic editor who once knew “Dragon Ball”, joined the comico website to hold a national comic contest.
Shueisha set up a manga division, hoping to cultivate its own excellent manga producers.
A small comic that calls on Japanese cartoonists to participate in the production of Joman
But when I really started, I found that from paper media to smartphones, the change is by no means as simple as changing a frame.
The first thing to change is the production publishing process.
In the era of print media, the publishing platform is limited, and there are only dozens of pages in a magazine, and the editor has the final say on who is on and who is on. Therefore, the editor has the supreme authority in the entire publishing process.
The creation of traditional Japanese comics is a small workshop production mode of “writer + editor”.
But in the era of smartphones, there is no page limit, everyone has the opportunity to publish their works, editors no longer control the life and death of comics, and the creative initiative returns to the author’s standard.
In South Korea and China, the production of comic strips is usually completed by a studio. Some people are full-time screenwriters, and some people are full-time in painting, background, and coloring. Each link has become a subdivision unit on the industrial assembly line.
As a result, the publication is fast and the update is fast. The so-called “high-yield like a sow” is the result of such an industrialized assembly line.
The second is the update of creative techniques.
In the era of comic strips, all the storytelling skills and painting methods accumulated in the paper media must be overturned, and the sliding screen reading will be the basis again, and the visual movement will be considered.
And this is the most lacking ability of Japanese manga artists immersed in paper.
Japanese manga fans copied Korean manga storyboards and sighed at the brilliance of their techniques
Judging from the final works of “TOON GATE”, Japan still has a long way to go before it finds a mature enough manga author.
“TOON GATE” finalist works, there is still a lot of room for improvement in painting
However, despite the lack of success, the Japanese comics industry has also found an expedient solution.
This year, major manga publishers with big IPs have taken a different approach and started to develop strip manga works adapted from traditional popular manga.
In the first half of this year, the news that “Dorolo”, “Fullmetal Alchemist” and “Bungo Stray Dogs” are going to be comic strips came out one after another, that is to say, with the help of AI and artificial intelligence, the traditional comic storyboards were dismantled in a stripped-down way. Adapted into a form that is convenient for reading on mobile phones.
At the comic exhibition, the booths of strip comics began to be added.
Torishima Kazuhiko and other industry seniors also came forward to correct Joman’s name.
Torishima said: “The true meaning of manga is that it is easy to understand and easy to read.”
Bei Shi, who had been thrown out the flyers in person, also became a guest of the major publishing houses. She said:
“I believe that one day in the future, we will be able to say openly, I like to watch comics, and Japanese comics are very beautiful!”
The oversleeping frontrunners are starting to catch up, but is it too late?
In the years to come, we will witness the answer.