If you've checked Netflix's global charts this month, you've seen Agent Kim Reactivated sitting at the top. The So Ji-sub action series — an ordinary single dad turns out to be a retired black-ops agent, and goes looking for his kidnapped daughter — has led Netflix's weekly non-English TV chart for three straight weeks, pulling 8.2 million views in the most recent tracking week and reaching the top 10 in 73 countries.
Here's the detail that's easy to miss if you're new to Korean pop culture: like a striking number of K-drama hits before it, the show didn't start as a screenplay. It started as a webtoon — specifically Manager Kim, a Naver webtoon by Jeong Jong-taek and Toy. Once you learn to spot the pattern, you'll see it everywhere.
What a webtoon actually is
A webtoon is a digital comic built for phones: full color, vertical scroll, released in bite-sized weekly episodes. The format emerged in South Korea in the early 2000s on web portals — which is where the name comes from — and grew into a full-blown industry dominated by two platforms, Naver Webtoon (branded WEBTOON internationally) and Kakao.
The scale is bigger than most people outside Korea assume. When Naver's webtoon arm, WEBTOON Entertainment, listed on the Nasdaq in June 2024, it raised about $315 million; the company has said its platforms reach around 170 million monthly active users across 150-plus countries. Most series are free to read, with newer episodes unlockable for small payments — a model that keeps millions of readers scrolling daily and generates something valuable to TV producers: proof of what audiences already love.
Why studios keep going back to the well
The list of webtoon-born hits is long. Itaewon Class came from a Kakao webtoon by Jo Gwang-jin. Netflix's Sweet Home, Hellbound and All of Us Are Dead all started as webtoons — All of Us Are Dead from Joo Dong-geun's Now at Our School. Streamers have noticed: Netflix and other platforms have struck deals with Korean webtoon publishers specifically to secure adaptation rights.
From a producer's point of view, the appeal is straightforward:
- The story is pre-tested. A webtoon that survived years of weekly serialization, with comment sections voting in real time, has already proven its hooks work. That de-risks an expensive production.
- The fanbase comes included. Millions of readers show up on premiere day ready to compare the casting to the panels.
- The storyboard already exists. Webtoons are visual, paced in episodes, and built around cliffhangers — much closer to a TV outline than a novel is.
The honest take: adaptation is not a guarantee
It's worth saying plainly: a beloved webtoon doesn't automatically make a great show. Adaptations regularly compress arcs, age characters up or down, and change endings, and fan reactions to those choices can be brutal. For every breakout there are adaptations that come and go quietly — the source material stacks the odds, it doesn't fix them.
Agent Kim Reactivated is a good example of an adaptation that seems to have earned its own audience rather than coasting on the source. Reviewers have credited the show's practical, one-man-army action choreography and So Ji-sub's casting as much as the webtoon's premise. The likable-dad-with-a-hidden-past setup is familiar genre territory; the execution is what kept it at No. 1.
If you want to read the originals
Getting into webtoons requires nothing but a phone:
- Start with the official apps. WEBTOON and Kakao's international apps carry official English translations of many major titles — supporting them pays the creators, and translation quality is far better than pirate sites.
- Check availability before you get attached. Not every Korean-language webtoon has an official English release yet, and some adaptations' source material lags behind in translation.
- Read after watching, not instead. Half the fun is seeing what the adaptation changed. Webtoon readers treat casting announcements as a spectator sport for exactly this reason.
- Expect a different pace. Weekly webtoon episodes take a few minutes each; a 100-episode series is a commitment closer to a long novel than a binge-watch.
The bigger picture
Webtoons have quietly become one of Korea's most effective cultural exports — not as a finished product, but as an idea engine feeding dramas and films that then travel worldwide. If the current chart run is any indication, the next global K-drama hit you watch has decent odds of existing, right now, as a vertical strip of panels being argued over in a comment section in Korean.
This article is independent editorial by Seoul Glow. We have no affiliation with the platforms or productions mentioned.