Transmedia Storytelling in East Asia: The Age of Digital Media

This book offers a thorough investigation of the recent surge of webtoons and manga/animation as the sources of transmedia storytelling for popular culture, not only in East Asia but in the wider global context.

An international team of experts employ a unique theoretical framework of media convergence supported by transmedia storytelling, alongside historical and textual analyses, to examine the ways in which webtoons and anime become some of the major sources for transmedia storytelling. The book historicizes the evolution of regional popular culture according to the surrounding digital media ecology, driving the change and continuity of the manhwa industry over the past 15 years, and discusses whether cultural products utilizing transmedia storytelling take a major role as the primary local cultural product in the cultural market.

Offering new perspectives on current debates surrounding transmedia storytelling in the cultural industries, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, East Asian studies and cultural studies.

Dal Yong Jin is Distinguished SFU Professor. Jin’s major research interests are on digital platforms and digital games, globalization and media, transnational cultural studies, and the political economy of media and culture. Jin’s books include Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (MIT Press, 2010), New Korean Wave: transnational cultural power in the age of social media (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Smartland Korea: mobile communication, culture and society (University of Michigan Press, 2017), and Globalization and Media in the Digital Platform Age(Routledge, 2019).