Snooping Through Naver's Canvas

Publishers don't do it enough.

Somewhere in the middle of my career at Lezhin, I got permission to start talking to webtoon creators outside of Korea in order to publish originals for the English platform. At the time, we had published 3 titles and the thinking was… why don’t we do more?

I spent weeks sending emails, talking to comics publishers, artists, writers, just... everyone and anyone who I possibly could about publishing on the US platform. My targets were published artists, writers, comic book creators... basically folks who I thought could hit the ground running.

While it seems obvious now, approaching published creatives about working in a semi-popular medium based out of a foreign country went about as well as you might expect. But on the other hand, I got really good at drafting opening emails.

Eventually, someone noticed I was at the end of my wits and scheduled me a meeting with the PDs on the Korean side. I still remember sitting in the meeting and going through the bullet points of my approach. My strategy and the kind of webtoons I was hoping to produce.

It took one question to bring down my house of cards: “How many responses have you had?”

I can still hear my younger, overachieving voice squeak slightly when I admitted I hadn’t gotten any responses.

That’s when they pointed me at Canvas.

I was hesitant. The last thing I wanted to do was to start poaching creators from a competing company. Weren’t there rules? Was this allowed? What if someone said something?

At the time, there were several avenues for creators to publish amateur titles in Korea and Naver’s “Dojeon” was one. And while it was popular, creators by no means signed exclusivity rights to publish on it.

What was the point of creators publishing their work if editors weren’t going to reach out to them?

<Romantic Marbling> was one of Lezhin's earliest hits for Korea and the US. I picked up editing duties for the English version near the end of its run. But it was originally a Naver "Dojeon" title.

During its initial run, the team at Lezhin got in touch with the creator and offered them a contract. It wasn’t unheard of at the time, and there was a “protocol” in place for creators who switched platforms. Take down all existing episodes and leave up a notice for fans of the series.

The <Romantic Marbling> notice is still available on the Korean listing on Naver Webtoon. It thanks the readers and apologizes for not being able to update fans on the sudden pause in publication.

Then it blasts the old Lezhin Comics banner and tells everyone to head on over and read it in May.

Brings a smile to my face every time.

A few months later, I did find a few creators to work with and signed two titles to the LezhinUS platform for exclusive distribution. One of the titles was submitted to the World Lezhin Contest and it eventually found its way to my desk. I did my digging and eventually found the creator’s initial webtoon offering… on Canvas.

Cue face palm.

For anyone else out there looking at the webtoon industry, I’d highly recommend taking time out of your week to read Canvas (or 도전 if your Korean’s good enough). If only to see what kind of unsigned talent there is out there in the creator-verse.

And to all the creators publishing on Canvas, keep publishing^^