285 Crunchyroll and the Webtoon-Image: Reterritorialising the Korean Digital Wave in Telecom Animation’s Tower of God (2020) and MAPPA’s The God of High School (2020) David John Boyd Between 2010 and 2020, the South Korean-born digital comic form, known popularly as the webtoon (a portmanteau of “web” + “cartoon”), erupted onto the international media scene with the same fervour as the frst ebbs and fows of Hallyu (“Korean new wave”) in the frst few years of the new millennium. The earliest webtoon, a predominantly digitally mediated, vertically oriented comic, adorned with full-colour images and unique canvases of white or black, was primarily constructed within the design framework of reading via a web-based platform, whereby readers scrolled downward with their mouse as they continued to follow the images, text, and makeshift panels. The early webtoon naturalised vertical reading pattern that is not unlike scanning an online periodical, blog, or D. J. Boyd (*) University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: dr.david.john.boyd@gmail.com © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacifc, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_16