At New York Comic Con 2025, Webtoon hosted the panel “Entire Universes in Your Pocket: The Future Is Digital Comics with Webtoon featuring Marvel.”
Hosted by Eisner-nominated journalist Rob Salkowitz (ICv2, Forbes), the panel featured Webtoon executive producer Quinn Sosna-Spear, Webtoon head of US content, Ryan Lee, and president of Marvel Entertainment, Dan Buckley. Puck Media’s Julie Alexander was meant to appear, but unfortunately could not appear due to illness.
The panel kicked off with Salkowitz asking the panelists about their favorite comics characters. Sosna-Spear said her favorite character has to be the Juggernaut from the X-Men series of comics. Lee said it has to be Spider-Man Miles Morales, while Buckley said Ben Grimm AKA the Thing from the Fantastic Four.
From there the discussion was about how Marvel Comics has been at the digital forefront since the early 2000s. Once the iPad and Comixology came out around the end of the decade, the digital comics landscape changed entirely.
Lee further elaborated that digital comics began to take off around 2004 and grew in popularity around 2007 with the release of the iPhone’s. It was around that time that Webtoon saw huge potential in the accessibility and portability of digital comics , which led to its usage of the vertical scrolling format.
Lee said the format is so important to make people enjoy the comics on Webtoon, which has over 5 thousand webcomics available globally.
Sosna-Spear said that where people read now is a big focus in the ever-evolving comics landscape, and most people seem to be reading digitally.
Marvel has partnered with Webtoon to introduce stories from its existing catalog to new readers, as well as to publish new stories on the digital comics platform to broaden its reader base. Lee said Webtoons goal in bringing in the existing Marvel audience is to make as many series available world-wide as it can. Marvel just so happens to be one of the biggest IP houses available.
The panel highlighted some of the Marvel stories hitting Webtoon:
- Astonishing X-Men (2004) – Date TBD
- The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl – Date TBD
- Star Wars: Darth Vader – Black, White & Red – Date TBD
- Star Wars: Lost Stars – Date TBD
- Stitch & The samurai: The Complete Collection – Date TDB
Marvel and other publishers have to adjust story formats from traditional panel layouts to vertical scrolling for Webtoon. In the back half of the panel, Salkowitz asked, “When it comes to vertical comics, how much of the visual language needs to be rethought?”
Lee said, “Every panel is redone with the intent to capture the original idea and the intent of the author in vertical format. That is the overall goal.”
According to the panelists, Marvel called the original artists to ask permission to make the necessary edits and, in some cases, artists wanted to participate in the reformatting process. Whatever their involvement, artists seemed eager to see the final product on Webtoon.
Buckley remarked that one noticeable challenge is divvying up existing Marvel titles into Webtoon-length episodes or chapters. To meet reader expectations, it sometimes means incorporating one-and-a-half or even two issues into a single episode to fit the length.
Finally, Buckley said that there will come a time when artists who grew up reading and creating webtoons are the ones making Marvel Comics for Webtoon.
Stay tuned to K-Comics Beat for more coverage from NYCC 2025.
