What is manhwa? Meaning, history and examples

Manhwa meaning: where the word comes from

In Korean, manhwa is simply the everyday word for comics and cartoons of any kind. English speakers borrowed it to mean Korean comics in particular, the same way "manga" came to mean Japanese comics.

The three words are related. Manhwa (Korean), manga (Japanese) and manhua (Chinese) are readings of the same two characters, written 漫畫 in Korean hanja and traditional Chinese and 漫画 in Japanese and simplified Chinese. Loosely translated, they mean "impromptu sketches". So the word tells you where a comic was made, not what it looks like or what it is about.

It is pronounced roughly "MAHN-hwah". The plural in English is usually just manhwa: one manhwa, three manhwa.

A short history: from rental shops to phone apps

Comics became popular in South Korea in the 1950s and 1960s. Many readers did not buy them: they borrowed them from rental shops or read them in manhwabang, comic rooms where you paid to sit and read. From the mid-1960s the government controlled how comics were distributed and censored what they could show.

The big change came online. After South Korea's economic crisis at the end of the 1990s, much of the industry moved to the internet, and Korean web portals gave comics their own free sections. Free reading won readers, and lighter rules than print won artists. That is how the scrolling webtoon became the main form of manhwa; our guide to what a webtoon is tells that part of the story, including how the apps went global.

Today most people outside Korea meet manhwa on a phone app, often after watching an anime or a TV drama based on one. Older print series are still around in translation, but nearly every new hit starts life as a weekly webtoon.

How manhwa look and read today

If you open a manhwa on an app, four things stand out compared with a manga volume:

• It scrolls down. Each episode is one long vertical strip. Panels are stacked down the screen with white or black space between them, and you read from top to bottom with your thumb. This is the webtoon format, and it is how nearly every new manhwa is published.
• It is in full colour. Artists draw digitally and colour every panel. Older manhwa printed as books were mostly black and white, like manga.
• It reads left to right. When manhwa are printed as books, the pages run left to right, like an English book. Japanese manga runs right to left.
• It comes out in episodes. A new episode usually lands once a week on a fixed day. WEBTOON's Originals page, for example, sorts its ongoing series into one tab per weekday, plus a tab for completed ones (checked 30 October 2026). Long series also take breaks between seasons: Solo Leveling's first season ended in March 2020 and its second began in August 2020.

Many popular manhwa start life as web novels. Solo Leveling, for instance, began as a web novel by Chugong on KakaoPage in 2016; the webtoon, drawn by Dubu of Redice Studio, followed in 2018. That is why you will often see a manhwa and a novel with the same title.

Most apps let you read the first episodes and older ones free, and charge coins to read the newest episodes early. On WEBTOON, those early-access episodes become free after a set time, so waiting costs nothing.

Manhwa vs manga in one minute

The stories overlap a lot: action, fantasy, romance and school stories are big in both. What differs is the country, the language and, most of the time, the format. Manga is Japanese, printed in black and white in magazines and books and read right to left. Modern manhwa is Korean, full colour and made for a phone. The full comparison of manga, manhwa and manhua has a side-by-side table and shows how to tell them apart from a single page.

What is manhua?

Manhua are comics from China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. The word comes from the same characters as manhwa and manga. Like modern manhwa, most manhua are now published online in full colour, often as vertical strips on Chinese apps, so the two can look almost identical on a phone.

The text and the setting are the giveaway. Manhua use Chinese characters with no Korean Hangul and no Japanese kana. Many of the best-known manhua in English are fantasy stories about cultivation and martial arts, with sects, elders and heroes training to become immortal; Tales of Demons and Gods is a well-known example. Chinese animated series, often adapted from manhua or web novels, are called donghua.

If you want the details, the guide to the difference between manga, manhwa and manhua covers scripts, colour, reading direction and the edge cases that fool people.

Popular kinds of manhwa

Manhwa cover every genre, but a few kinds of story are so common that fans have names for them. If one of these sounds like what you like, its guide explains the setup, the words fans use and where to start:

• Murim manhwa: martial artists, sects and clans in a hidden world, usually set in a version of old China.
• Isekai manhwa: the lead is pulled into another world, a game or the novel they were reading.
• Villainess manhwa: a heroine wakes up as the doomed villain of a story she knows, and tries to change her ending.
• Reincarnation manhwa: a second life in a new body, or a return to the past with all the memories of the first one.
• Cultivation manhua: heroes train their qi to climb realms toward immortality. This one is mostly Chinese manhua, but many manhwa readers read both.

Two more you will see everywhere: "hunter" or "dungeon" stories, where monsters pour out of gates into the modern world and people with powers fight them, and romance fantasy set in noble houses and royal courts. Many series mix several of these at once.

Examples of famous manhwa

If you want to see what a manhwa is in practice, these are the titles that come up again and again, and why people talk about them:

• Solo Leveling (story by Chugong, art by Dubu): the hunter story that made many people outside Korea try manhwa. Its anime, made by A-1 Pictures, began in January 2024, which is why some fans think it is a manga.
• Tower of God (by SIU): a long fantasy series about climbing a mysterious tower. It started on Naver Webtoon in June 2010 and was one of the first webtoons translated into English in 2014.
• True Beauty (by Yaongyi): a school romance about make-up and identity that was also adapted into a Korean TV drama.

To see what a title is about before you start, look it up on AniList's manga search, which shows the country of origin, the genres and the official places to read it.

Where to read manhwa legally

The easiest start is WEBTOON, which has a large free catalogue and runs on iOS, Android and the web. Other official apps, such as Tappytoon and Manta, specialise in licensed Korean series and mostly charge per episode or by subscription. Which app has a series depends on who bought the English rights, and some apps change or close: Tapas, for example, announced it will shut down on 31 March 2027.

Our guide to legal manhwa sites and manga apps compares what each one carries and costs, and shows how to spot a pirate site that only looks official.

Found a manhwa panel and want the name?

A screenshot from a TikTok edit, a Discord chat or a friend's phone is usually enough. Crop one frame, without the app bars and speech bubbles, and search it with Google Lens and Yandex first, since general engines know colour webtoon art better than the manga specialists. MangaTrace's manhwa finder does the cropping in your browser and sends the same crop to each engine in one click.

What MangaTrace cannot do: host or translate manhwa. It finds the title, then points you to official places to read it. No picture at all? Describe the story with filters in find a manhwa by genre and tags.