Manga has already survived one spectacular boom-and-bust cycle. Then another. If the latest US sales data are any indication, the format may finally have reached the point where the interesting question is no longer whether manga can survive, but what grows around it next.
According to Publishers Weekly, manga sales in the United States jumped 40% between 2025 and 2026, based on Circana BookScan data. Circana separately reported a 45% increase in manga unit sales during the first quarter of 2026, making manga one of the strongest categories in the US print book market.
That rebound matters after three years of decline from the extraordinary pandemic-era peak. It also arrives as another Asian comics format is becoming increasingly difficult to treat as a side story.
Webtoons are moving from the phone to the bookshelf.
The transition is particularly revealing because the direct attempt to reproduce the Korean digital-platform model in Europe has produced some painful failures. Kakao’s Piccoma withdrew from France in 2024 after little more than two years of operation. Delcourt’s Verytoon had already disappeared.
Yet Korean comics did not disappear with those platforms. Titles born as vertical digital comics are increasingly being repackaged as physical books, sold alongside manga and collected by readers who may have originally discovered them on a screen.
That creates a strange reversal. The future of webtoons outside Asia may depend partly on one of the oldest technologies in publishing: paper.
Table of Contents
- The manga rebound looks increasingly structural
- Piccoma discovered how difficult Europe could be
- Webtoons found another route into bookstores
- Turning a scroll into a book is harder than it looks
- Studios like MAKMA built a business around that problem
- What 2027 could look like for manga and print webtoons
- Manga and print webtoons: key questions
The manga rebound looks increasingly structural
The latest US numbers need some context. Manga sales exploded during the pandemic, with Circana data cited by Publishers Weekly showing a 160% increase between 2020 and 2021. Lockdowns gave consumers more time and, in many cases, more disposable income, while anime became easier than ever to discover through streaming services.
The correction that followed was severe enough to revive an old fear inside the publishing industry: perhaps manga had experienced another bubble.
There was historical precedent. The US manga business grew rapidly during the 2000s before the financial crisis and the collapse of Borders helped trigger a painful contraction. The post-2020 decline therefore looked uncomfortably familiar.
The 2026 rebound complicates that narrative.
Kristen McLean, vice president of client insights at Circana, told Publishers Weekly that she sees the recent decline less as the end of manga’s expansion than as a stabilization after an exceptional period. Her outlook remains strong through 2028, with manga now established as a permanent part of the US comics business.
The audience has also changed. Anime is no longer something readers have to hunt down through specialty stores, imported DVDs or obscure television slots. Major streaming services provide a continuous discovery engine for Japanese properties, while social platforms can turn relatively obscure series into international fandoms remarkably quickly.
Print publishing sits downstream from that machine.
But manga is no longer the only Asian comics format benefiting from it.
Piccoma discovered how difficult Europe could be
The history of Piccoma in Europe offers a useful warning against assuming that the Asian digital comics model can simply be exported.
Kakao established its European subsidiary in France in 2021 and launched Piccoma there in March 2022. France looked like an obvious beachhead. It has one of the world’s deepest comics cultures and an enormous manga readership, giving a Korean webtoon company what appeared to be a highly receptive audience.
The expansion never reached the scale Kakao expected.
In 2024, the company announced that Piccoma would end its European service and dissolve its Paris-based subsidiary. The service ultimately shut down on September 30. Kakao said market growth had been weaker than initially expected and that the group wanted to concentrate its resources, particularly on Japan.
The episode exposed an important distinction between demand for Korean comics and demand for a specific digital business model.
French readers were clearly willing to consume manga, manhwa and webtoons. Convincing enough of them to adopt another dedicated reading platform was a different proposition.
Piccoma was not alone. Delcourt had already closed its Verytoon platform. A 2025 report produced by the French cultural network in South Korea described Europe as representing only 8.2% of Korean webtoon exports and noted a significant retreat by Korean companies from French-language platforms during 2024 and 2025.
That could have looked like evidence that the European webtoon experiment had failed.
Bookstores tell a more complicated story.
Webtoons found another route into bookstores
Publishers Weekly points to Ize Press, the Yen Press imprint dedicated to Korean comics, as one of the beneficiaries of changing American tastes. Yen Press publisher Kurt Hassler argues that readers who were already consuming webtoons online also wanted the opportunity to own physical editions.
That sounds obvious in retrospect, but it changes the economics of the category.
A digital platform has to acquire users, keep them inside its ecosystem and persuade them to pay for episodes or subscriptions in a market crowded with entertainment alternatives. A physical webtoon can instead enter an infrastructure that manga spent decades building: publishers, bookstores, online retailers, libraries, specialist stores and shelves already visited by comics readers.
The phenomenon is visible in France as well.
Webtoon publishing specialist Manket counted approximately 330 print webtoon releases in France during 2025. Kbooks and Pika accounted for 46% of total releases and new series between them, while Pika’s print webtoon output nearly tripled compared with 2024.
The numbers also contain a warning. Manket counted only 45 new print webtoon launches in 2025, down from 80 in 2024. Manga Insight similarly recorded a year-over-year decline in webtoon publishing volume during the first quarter of 2026.
So this is not a simple story of unlimited expansion. Publishers are becoming selective.
That may actually be healthy.
The first phase of a new publishing category is often about acquiring licenses and filling catalogs. The next is about discovering which properties can support multiple volumes, premium editions and durable readership.
The successes matter precisely because they show what that model can become. Solo Leveling, originally a Korean web novel before becoming a webtoon, has become a major physical publishing property. Le Monde reported in 2025 that the series had sold 2.5 million copies in France.
The phone created the audience.
The bookstore monetized it again.
Turning a scroll into a book is harder than it looks
There is a technical problem hiding inside this business model.
A webtoon is not simply a comic displayed vertically. Its storytelling is built around scrolling. Empty space controls rhythm. A reveal can appear when the reader moves a thumb. Long vertical compositions can create scale or suspense. Dialogue, action and visual information are distributed across a potentially continuous canvas.
A printed book has completely different constraints.
It has fixed pages. Page turns. Rectangular spreads. Margins. Bleeds. Reading density. A sequence designed for several meters of vertical scrolling can become awkward if panels are simply copied into pages.
This conversion process is sometimes described as printoonization: adapting a webtoon created for vertical digital reading into a page-based physical comic.
Good printoonization therefore involves much more than rearranging images.
Panels may need to be resized, repositioned or recombined. The rhythm of a sequence has to be reconstructed around pages and page turns. Vertical negative space that worked on a phone may need to disappear. An action sequence can require an entirely new composition to preserve its energy.
The objective is not to reproduce the scroll.
It is to reproduce the reading experience through a different grammar.
That requirement has created a small but increasingly relevant production business between Korean rights holders and Western publishers.
Studios like MAKMA built a business around that problem
French studio MAKMA was among the European specialists to formalize this process, using the term printoonization for its work converting digital vertical comics into physical pages.
Its experience also illustrates how specialized the work can become. MAKMA’s teams have handled translation, lettering, localization, webtoon production and adaptation between digital and physical formats. The studio describes printoonization as a narrative and graphical adaptation rather than a mechanical transfer of panels.
That distinction will matter more if publishers continue mining successful digital catalogs for print properties.
A Korean webtoon can theoretically generate value several times: as serialized digital content, as a translated international release, as a printed collection, and potentially as source material for animation, television, games or other adaptations.
Print therefore does not have to compete with digital reading.
It can become another stage in the intellectual property’s lifecycle.
The relationship can work in the opposite direction as well. A physical edition puts a property into bookstores, libraries and retail channels where consumers who never installed a webtoon application can encounter it.
That helps explain why Piccoma’s retreat from Europe and the growth of physical Korean comics are not contradictory.
One business asked European consumers to change how they bought comics.
The other puts new comics into a buying habit that already exists.
What 2027 could look like for manga and print webtoons
The strongest argument for 2027 is not that another explosive boom is inevitable. The available data point toward something more mature.
In the United States, manga enters the year with renewed momentum. Circana’s 2026 data show a major rebound, while McLean’s outlook extends that strength through 2028. Anime continues to function as a powerful discovery mechanism, and publishers have become much better at reaching audiences outside the traditional comic-shop market.
Korean comics add another source of growth without necessarily replacing Japanese manga. Ize Press, Seven Seas, Tokyopop and other publishers have already demonstrated that web-native Korean properties can find physical audiences in North America.
France presents a more cautious picture. The broader manga market has been correcting from its post-Covid highs, and publishing data from 2025 and early 2026 suggest that editors are already reducing the number of new titles they launch. The same discipline is appearing in print webtoons.
Yet that contraction can coexist with growth around proven franchises.
2027 may therefore be less about flooding bookstores with new webtoon licenses and more about building larger businesses around the titles that have already demonstrated an audience.
The distinction matters. A category does not need hundreds of new launches every year to become commercially significant. It needs franchises capable of supporting long-running series, collector editions, merchandising, adaptations and repeat purchases.
The South Korean government certainly expects the underlying industry to keep expanding. Its development plan targets a domestic comics and webtoon industry worth KRW 4 trillion by 2027, up from KRW 2.6 trillion in 2022, while targeting $250 million in exports.
Those are government targets, not guaranteed market outcomes. Europe in particular has already demonstrated that global ambitions can run into local consumer behavior.
But the failure of some digital platforms may have taught the industry something useful.
The future of comics does not have to be a battle between screens and paper.
A reader can discover a series through an anime, binge its webtoon on a phone and then spend considerably more money collecting beautifully produced physical volumes. Publishers can use digital platforms as global discovery systems while bookstores turn successful properties into durable objects.
Manga spent decades building that bridge between Japanese popular culture and Western bookshelves.
Webtoons are now crossing it.
And if 2027 continues the pattern emerging in 2026, one of the most important growth stories in digital comics may happen in print.
Manga and print webtoons: key questions
Are manga sales growing again?
Yes in the United States. Publishers Weekly reports that Circana BookScan data show manga sales rising 40% between 2025 and 2026, following several years of decline after the pandemic boom.
Why did Piccoma leave Europe?
Kakao said growth in France had been weaker than expected and decided to consolidate its operations. Piccoma ended its European service in September 2024 after launching in France in 2022.
Does Piccoma’s exit mean webtoons failed in Europe?
No. It demonstrates the difficulty of establishing a Korean-style digital platform, rather than an absence of interest in Korean comics. Physical editions of webtoons continue to be published by numerous French publishers.
What is printoonization?
Printoonization is the adaptation of a vertically scrolling webtoon into a page-based physical comic. It can require panels, pacing and compositions to be reorganized so that the story works naturally as a book.
Why would readers buy a webtoon they can already read digitally?
Physical editions offer ownership, collectibility and a different reading experience. Premium production, color printing and collector editions can also turn successful digital properties into desirable physical objects.
Will print webtoons grow in 2027?
Current trends support further development of the category, particularly around established franchises, but the French publishing data also show publishers becoming more selective about launching new series. Growth should therefore not be assumed to be uniform across titles or markets.
Sources: Publishers Weekly, Circana, South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism