• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.48
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• pp.217-247
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• 2017

A brand webtoon is the webtoon to be planned for advertising. It can be appealed like a webtoon, so recently it becomes popular as one of brand storytelling contents. This study looked at the fact that the webcomic artists have released webtoons having apparent style as a series for many years in the online portal site have published multiple brand webtoons. And it analyzed the expression, narrative structure, and character being shared between their webtoon and brand webtoons. Through this analysis, we can look a spin-off phenomenon between their webtoon and brand webtoons. The spin-off phenomenon means a making the other stories basis on character or situation of drama, movie, novel and etc that have already published, like a supplementary story. And we can recognize a spin-off phenomenon in these cases that have the same story style what make an emotion like the genre, concept, world concept, expression style, narrative structure or use the same characters. For this study, It analyzed Kwak baek soo's and 5 brand webtoons including on Naver, Kim yang soo's and 3 brand webtoons on Naver, Kim Jin's and 2 brand webtoons on Naver, and Petermon's and 1 brand webtoon on Daum. And It analyzed how the readers have accepted it through making a comparison between number of recommendations and reply of brand webtoon and the original webtoon in the same esason. This research will be helpful for study about brand webtoon storytelling and also webtoon storytelling through analyzing how the expression and narrative structure of webtoon are adapted to brand webtoon and get likability.

• The Journal of Bigdata
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.173-185
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• 2022

Nowadays, Korean webtoons are leading the global digital comic market. Webtoons are being serviced in various languages around the world, and dramas or movies produced with Webtoons' IP (Intellectual Property Rights) have become a big hit, and more and more webtoons are being visualized. However, with the success of these webtoons, the working environment of webtoon creators is emerging as an important issue. According to the 2021 Cartoon User Survey, webtoon creators spend 10.5 hours a day on creative activities on average. Creators have to draw large amount of pictures every week, and competition among webtoons is getting fiercer, and the amount of paintings that creators have to draw per episode is increasing. Therefore, this study proposes to generate webtoon background images using deep learning algorithms and use them for webtoon production. The main character in webtoon is an area that needs much of the originality of the creator, but the background picture is relatively repetitive and does not require originality, so it can be useful for webtoon production if it can create a background picture similar to the creator's drawing style. Background generation uses CycleGAN, which shows good performance in image-to-image translation, and CartoonGAN, which is specialized in the Cartoon style image generation. This deep learning-based image generation is expected to shorten the working hours of creators in an excessive work environment and contribute to the convergence of webtoons and technologies.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.194-204
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• 2016

With the fast diffusion of smart media, Webtoon has become popular contents among Korean people. Webtoon's content is being used in various content industries, such as movies and drama, and thus its cultural influence is increasing. Using ordinal Regression analysis, this study tried to find major factors affecting webtoon's success. This study found that readers' rating, number of likes, OSMU, author power, genre, picture style are important factors affecting the success of webtoon. This study has several business implications for the Korean webtoon industry.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.389-395
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• 2016

Korean cartoons, seeking an exit from economic distress, naturally entered the era of webtoons as the Internet arose in early 2,000s. Webtoons, a new concept of cartoon, are drawn mostly by oneself, whereas cartoons before were drawn with the help of many apprentices. This research demonstrates that webtoon artists are required to use many programs and fully understand the Internet environment in order to draw webtoons. This tough conditions pose many problems for an artist who should draw well and quickly under the circumstances. We are now at a stage where a simple webtoon program is needed and will go over alternatives. I have researched characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of webtoon's core programs such as Photoshop, Comicstudio, Cytool, and Clipstudio, and what would be the optimal functions for webtoons. I offer new programs that are optimized for story cartoons that can be utilized with webtoons.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.51
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• pp.255-291
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• 2018

The domestic cartoon industry has went through rapid reformation since 2010 incurred by the emergence of webtoon. Most of the students in cartoon schools long to become webtoonists rather than published cartoonists. Cartoon education in middle and high schools rather focuses on webtoons. The growth of webtoons in private education, excluding college entrance examination, is even more promising. In the same train of thought, the number of webtoon private education institution has surged exponentially. Despite provincial colleges experiencing difficulty due to the lack of the student population, the competition for cartoon admission is intensifying. However, college education often maintains curriculums that do not relate to the on-site demands. Cartoon education in the past was mostly carried out through apprenticeship programs. However such programs began to disappear as college education became more common and as people embraced the emergence of webtoons. Instead collective education and author debut programs replaced the old system. Individualization of education is exacerbating as digital writing tools allow individual webtoonists to publish their works on a weekly basis. The background of the growth of webtoon education can obviously be explained by the growth of the market but there are aspects that can't be explained in such a simple manner. This study examines the current webtoon education status and discusses possible methodological and formation development measures for the future. The introduction examines the change in education and market. The main subject examines the current secondary schools and universities cartoon education and conducts a comprehensive study on the various education related changes. This study proposes future directions for universities by looking at the webtoon era and education changes in the conclusion. It also researched how the units of college cartoon education will fuse and deduct practical results via government policies.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.478-486
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• 2017

The development of webtoon accelerated with development of smart devices. It became a daily life to enjoy digital contents such as webtoon using smartphones on the streets and subways, not just for the novelty of the new generation. With the advent of smart devices, the webtoon market has grown rapidly and webtoons of various themes and genres are pouring out. The growth of webtoon market is a good opportunity for artists, but competition is getting worse and it is difficult to satisfy readers with low quality. In order to create webtoon that can satisfy the readers, the artists are considered as important homework that can show the interesting story and show it effectively. In this study, I tried to prove that the method of directing using shot among the elements of animation can be utilized for directing webtoon effectively. In order to explain this, I have tried to explain the characteristics of webtoon and its relation with animation, and I chose the most important example of webtoon, 'Ko Soo(Ryu Ki woon, Moon jeong hu, 2015)', which has been popularized with successful storytelling and directing, and described character shot and time transition shot.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.76-83
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• 2023

This study proposes a method to assist webtoon artists in the process of webtoon creation by utilizing a pretrained Text-to-Image model to generate webtoon images from text. The proposed approach involves fine-tuning a pretrained Stable Diffusion model using a webtoon dataset transformed into the desired webtoon style. The fine-tuning process, using LoRA technique, completes in a quick training time of approximately 4.5 hours with 30,000 steps. The generated images exhibit the representation of shapes and backgrounds based on the input text, resulting in the creation of webtoon-like images. Furthermore, the quantitative evaluation using the Inception score shows that the proposed method outperforms DCGAN-based Text-to-Image models. If webtoon artists adopt the proposed Text-to-Image model for webtoon creation, it is expected to significantly reduce the time required for the creative process.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.38
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• pp.177-194
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• 2015

This study that had been conducted two months by a research team of Pusan National University at the request of Korea Manwha Contents Agency in Dec. 2013 is about the statistical analysis on 'Korean Webtoon DB and its Flow Report' which resulted from the complete survey of Korean webtoons which had been published with payment in official media from early 2000 to 2013. Webtoon which means the cartoons published on web has become a typical type of Korean cartoons and has developed into a main industry since 2000s when traditional published cartoons had declined and social environments had changed. Today, it represents cultural contents in Korea. This study collected the webtoons officially published in media with payment, among Korean webtoons having been published from the early 2000s to Jan. Based on the collected data, it analyzed the general characteristics of webtoons, including cartoonists, the number of cartoons, distribution chart of each media, genre, and publication cycle. According to the data analysis and statistics, a great deal of Korean webtoons are still published in main portal websites, but their platform is being diversified and a webtoon's publication cycle tends to be shortened. In terms of genre, traditional popular genres, such as drama, comic, fantasy, and action, are still popular, and the genres of history, sports, and food are on the rise along with a social trend. Regarding webtoon application, such events as relay webtoon and brand webtoon, and a new type of webtoon featuring PPL commercialism appear. Such phenomena can realize the common profits of cartoonists, media, and ordering bodies, and are various trials to test the possibility of webtoons. In addition, what needs to pay attention on in the expansion of webtoons is increasing webtoons for adults. The study subjects are the webtoons published with payment, excluding free webtoons. However, this study failed to collect the webtoons published on the online websites already closed, and the lost information on cartoonists and their lost webtoons, and it is necessary to conduct a complete survey on all webtoons including free ones. Despite the limitations, this study is meaningful in the points that it categorized and analyzed Korean webtoons accoridng to official media, webtoons, cartoonists, and genres and that it provided a fundamental material to understand the current conditions of webtoons. It is expected that this study will be able to contribute to activating more research on webtoons and producing more supplementary data which will be used for the Korean cartoon industry and academia.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.37
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• pp.335-360
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• 2014

An infatuation with webtoons is facilitated by the ultra-rapid internet infrastructures and the highest ratio of penetration of smartphones in the world. Recently, the webtoon has been the focus of a new cultural content and its development has been noticed both and home and abroad. This study aims to find the new role of webtoon as a socio-cultural communication media. The webtoon reflects the reality as it is and shows directly and minutely the social problems, even although the other media make it glorified or reduced. We observe the role of webtoon as a new communication media content that can make the place for social discussion within several generations and social stratums, in which the producer and the consumer can communicate directly and immediately. Two webtoons( and ) have been selected for a textual analysis. In two webtoons, we analyse the method of representation of the social problem in the technique of expression and storytelling. This helps us maintain that the webtoon deserves as the socio-cultural communication media and the social problems represented in webtoon must have been evaluated more valuable in a new perspective.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.46
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• pp.129-150
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• 2017

With the change in educational environment of cartoon creation and diversification of webtoon platforms, various ways of engaging webtoon authors have been suggested. Under this situation, Korea Manhwa Contents Agency(KOMACON) and Korea Creative Content Agency(KOCCA) provide support to webtoon authors directly and indirectly to nurture professional webtoon talents. Contents creative human resource joint project being carried out by KOCCA is mainly to nurture and support contents experts by developing their creativity through tight training between mentors and mentees, creating job opportunities, building the support system for creative activities, and supporting commercialization during the project. Undergoing the process of recruitment and selection, the participants of this project are educated, trained and developed according to education programs provided by the hosting agency, and this project has a model to compensate for creative activities for a ceratin period of time. However, there has been a problem that it is difficult to constantly keep and manage webtoon talents who are cultivated by human resource management of less than one-year project. This study analyzed creative human resource joint project which is a human resource development model, using human recourse theory and suggested a strategic human resource model based on webtoon authors' human resource model development.