A new comic just dropped on WEBTOON ⸺ and it’s an adaptation of the legendary Western web serial, Worth The Candle.
Worth The Candle is a 1.6-million-word-long LitRPG (a genre of prose fiction with RPG mechanics integrated into the storytelling) web serial by Alexander Wales, originally posted to Royal Road between 2017 and 2021. It has gained a significant cult following in English-language LitRPG serialized web fiction spaces, and was specifically pitched to me by a friend as “the one LitRPG that’s actually well-written.”
But a significant cult following in LitRPG spaces means numbers that are much lower than what’s typical for popular WEBTOON originals. The Royal Road uploads average 22,000 views per chapter, with about 5,000 subscribers, while similar comics on WEBTOON like Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (also adapted from a LitRPG, but Korean) have 3.7 million subscribers. Additionally, Royal Road is not a subsidiary of Naver or Wattpad WEBTOON Studios.
Worth the Candle is also the second fantasy web serial to have an adaptation launch on Webtoon in 2024. A Practical Guide to Evil appeared on the platform on October 28th, and that web serial is currently ranked #4 on the Top Web Fiction ranking platform, while Worth The Candle is not even in the top 50. So why this title? Why now, three years after the serial was completed?
Worth The Candle is a long story with a simple premise: Joon, the teenage protagonist, finds himself in a very strange yet oddly familiar world. A world that combines elements of all of the tabletop campaigns he played with his best friend, Arthur, who died recently. The story combines the traditional action-adventure elements of the LitRPG genre with Joon’s character arc of processing his grief over his best friend’s early death.
The description of the WEBTOON adaptation explains this basic concept using the most vague and confusing phrasing possible, but it seems to be appealing to WEBTOON’s readership: the comic has acquired nearly 20,000 subscribers in less than a day.
And the majority of those readers do not appear to have prior familiarity with Wales’ prose: the top comments on each of the first three chapters all seem to be coming from readers discovering the story for the first time, with maybe one comment amongst dozens referencing the original novel. On Wales’s Tumblr, he states his involvement with the vertical scroll adaptation to be “minimal.” Fans have replied to his post about the adaptation with excitement.
So far, the adaptation is serving the story well: the action sequences are dynamic, the gaming interface is well-designed, the characters are well-drawn. Hopefully the success of this vertical scroll comic will bring more Western LitRPG adaptations to vertical scroll comic portals across the internet.
