In May I wrote an opinion piece about the state of webcomics and webtoons. Today, news broke that major webcomics platform Tapas will be shutting down.
As described in my piece, worrying signs had already been there for a few years. Tapas had stopped publishing new English-language original comics in 2023, and has been cutting staff and costs on the North American side even before that. Parent company Kakao has also been experiencing turbulence these last few years with a lot of internal reorganization, so it’s not exactly a surprise that Tapas is closing, but it is shocking how little notice anybody had that this is the end. The site itself has yet to announce their closure or give a final End of Service date.
My strongest emotion in regards to the Tapas closing is, honestly, sadness. I am genuinely sad that this platform was bought at a premium by executives who had no idea what to do with it, only to strip it of its resources and toss it aside. I started using the platform back when it was still called Tapastic, before it was sold to Daum/Kakao. I was still in high school, WEBTOON had just barely launched in the US, and Tapas was the only place I knew of where I could read dozens of interesting webcomics in one place on my phone. Opening the app every day made me excited to see what new comics I would discover. I haven’t felt that way in years.
From its earliest beginnings as ComicPanda, the platform had positioned itself as a place that values artists more than its competitors. As late as this year, I noticed its comic upload features for user-generated comics had features that made the process smoother than WEBTOON’s Canvas platform (a spot to put an ad for your off-platform work, for example, and a more streamlined scheduling system).
However, posting my latest webcomic, Fragmentation, to Tapas netted me exactly one subscriber after three months of weekly updates. The discoverability is not what it used to be.
In 2022, I wrote favorably about Tapas’s moderation system in comparison to WEBTOON. In the same piece, I said it’s unlikely that we’ll return to self-hosted webcomics any time soon, because readers are much more comfortable with one-stop-shop apps than navigating to websites. But this sudden closure is pushing a lot of creators to seek alternatives, especially creators who’ve built real, loyal audiences on Tapas. What do you do when you know your life’s work, the place you’ve built your entire career, is going to vanish by the end of the year?
When Alex Carr from Tapas presented at the Anime NYC Licensing Summit just last month, he seemed confident in Tapas’s continued growth and development. Social media posts suggest staffers and creators alike were completely blindsided by the news, and I feel bad for everyone involved.
I’ve seen a few Bluesky posts positing that it’s time to tell readers what to do. I agree! I used the heck out of Google Reader to track my webcomics as a kid, until that shut down and I just memorized the schedules for all of my favorites. You don’t even have to do all that, just learn how to click links again! Your smartphone has a browser too!
When I started promoting my new webcomic at shows, people always asked me if I was going to post it on WEBTOON. And I am posting it on WEBTOON, but that wasn’t how I wanted my comic to be read. I was drawing it in page format and reformatting it for vertical scroll because I knew more people read comics on WEBTOON than anywhere else I was going to post it.
I wish that were not the case. I wish we could all make and share comics without the involvement of major tech corporations.
