After one particularly humiliating experience, Jugyeong begins to binge watch beauty bloggers at the advice of well-meaning netizens. It follows Lim Jugyeong, an awkward teen who’s picked on by the popular girls at school for her looks and unconventional love for horror manga and heavy metal. With over 6.3 million readers worldwide and a 2020 live-action drama to boot, True Beauty is a staple that’s quickly becoming a cult favorite. We’ll start this list with a long-running and extremely successful high-school romance that perfectly encapsulates some prominent themes in manhwa - bullying, loneliness, and self-discovery. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great manga out there, you can also take our 10-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized manga recommendation 😉ĭiscover the perfect manga for you. With that in mind, we’re here to offer you a guide to this expanding world! From high politics to LGBTQ+ stories, all presented with astonishing artistry, here are the 30 best manhwas sorted by genre (though many of these defy simple categorization). Manhwas are now almost exclusively published and read in this format, continously exploring new creative horizons. Today, there are over 15 million daily readers on the LINE app alone, and “webtoon” has become a catch-all term for online comics produced both by well-known artists and users themselves. Manhwa’s boom in the 2010s came hand in hand with the rise of free online comic-sharing sites like LINE Webtoon and Lezhin. Part of what defines the Korean manhwa, apart from being read left-to-right like in English and the frequent use of vibrant colors, is the emphasis on online publications. And while these three popular media share some historical origins in the early 20th century when Japan occupied much of East Asia, they are today different for more than just the nationality of their artists.

“Manhwa” (만화, 漫畵) is the Korean word for comic or print cartoon, much like the Japanese “ manga” and the Chinese “manhua”.

The Gamer, Season 4 by Sangyoung Seong