Five webtoons have won the 2026 “Today’s Korean Comics” awards, and all five are serialised on Naver WEBTOON.
The Korea Cartoonist Association and South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced the winners on October 20. The list:
- A Ghost Story in Wartime by Tae-jin Kang
- Osaka Loop Line by Hyeona Hyeon
- Low Orbit Human by Eun-young Cho
- The Journey of Ice and Steel by Uolon
- Tyranno Noh Kyung-Soo by Hiphop Sinsun
Low Orbit Human picked up a second prize on top of its win. The Korea Cartoonist Association President’s Award went to the same title, chosen from the 15 finalists.
How the winners were chosen
A selection committee made up of industry professionals, creators and reader representatives picked the five from 15 nominated works. The committee was set up in May, which gives some idea of how long the process runs before a result is announced.
Each winner gets the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Award and a cash prize of 7 million won, roughly US$5,000. The ceremony is on November 3, timed to the annual Comics Day celebration.
The award itself is not new. Today’s Korean Comics was established in 1999 and sits alongside the Bucheon Manhwa Awards and the Korea Content Awards as one of South Korea’s three main comics prizes. It dates from a time when print manhwa was the centre of the Korean comics industry.
This year the winners’ circle has no print work in it at all. A national prize handed out by a government ministry and a cartoonists’ association went entirely to vertical-scroll webtoons on a single platform.
What the winning titles are
The English information on most of these is thin. Four of the five are not officially available in English, so what follows is limited to what has been published about them.
The Journey of Ice and Steel is the exception. It has been serialised in English on WEBTOON since June, which makes it the one title on the list that international readers can actually open today. Anyone curious about what the Korean awards circuit is rewarding this year should probably start there.
Low Orbit Human took both the main prize and the association’s president’s award. That second one is chosen separately, from the fifteen finalists rather than from the winners, so a title carrying both is the standout of this batch.
As for the rest, the titles are all there is to go on. Four of the five have no English release and no widely circulated synopsis, which is not enough to describe them fairly.
Why this year’s list matters
Awards like this get read as a snapshot of what a national industry considers good, and this snapshot is unusually clear. Five webtoons, one platform, a government ministry and a cartoonists’ association signing off on all of it.
For readers outside Korea, the practical value is smaller. An award is not a licence, and none of these wins will suddenly produce English editions. But the list is a useful signal for what Korean publishers and critics think is worth attention right now, and WEBTOON’s English catalogue has been pulling from that same pool for years.
The platform has already been expanding its reach in other directions. It announced a Marvel Comics app for November, part of a wider push to sit next to traditional publishers rather than below them. It also named two co-CEOs for Naver Webtoon in October, a sign of how large the operation has become.
The other thing this list shows is how completely the vertical scroll format has taken over the Korean market. Print manhwa still exists, and there are publishers and readers who care about it. But the national award shortlist, the thing that is supposed to represent the best of the year, did not find room for any of it.
Both facts can be true at once. The webtoon industry is producing work that a government jury considers award-worthy, and the older print tradition that the same jury grew up with is no longer where the energy is.
The ceremony is on November 3. Winners receive their awards during Comics Day, and readers who want to sample the list can start with The Journey of Ice and Steel on WEBTOON.
Sources
Anime News Network — 2026 Today’s Korean Comics Awards announce 5 winners, citing Yonhap
Featured image: Announcement graphic for the 2026 Today’s Korean Comics awards, via Anime News Network.
