Marvel and DC both have robust webtoon programs, but rather than putting their comics on popular platforms such as Webtoon and Tapas, they are publishing vertical-scroll comics on their own branded digital services, Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite. Despite this similarity in strategy, though, the two publishers take different approaches.

Marvel’s biggest success so far is Jeff the Landshark, who first appeared as a side character in West Coast Avengers #7. His first solo comic was a webtoon, or as Marvel calls their vertical-scroll comics, “Infinity Comic,” that launched on the Marvel Unlimited platform in 2021 and was nominated for the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. The first print comic, It’s Jeff: The Jeff-Verse #1 (see “Marvel’s Jeff the Landshark Leaps from Webtoon to Print”), was one of the top 200 comics of 2023 and won the 2024 Eisner for Best Humor Publication. Jeff now has several other series, the most recent of which launched last week (see “Preview: ‘Jeff the Land Shark’ #1”). And the graphic novel It’s Jeff: Jeff-Verse was one of the top webtoon properties of Spring 2025 (see “Top Webtoon Properties”).

Jeff’s fame didn’t come from a movie, an animated series, or a broad-based marketing campaign. Just the opposite, in fact: Marvel Unlimited is a subscription-only service. While many of the Infinity Comics are available for free, the reader still has to create an account to get to them. This means the Infinity Comics are unlikely to be seen by the sort of casual reader who frequents the other webtoon platforms, such as Webtoon, Tapas, Lezhin, and Manta.

Marvel now has created hundreds of webtoons, ranging from Jeff and his funny-animal companions The Lovable Lockheed and Alligator Loki to more serious titles such as X-Men: From the Ashes and Venom: Original Sin.Marvel has published some as print comics, while others remain digital only. One Infinity Comic that made it to print was Marvel Rivals #1, which ties in to the popular video game and was ComicHub's 13th best selling comic in Spring 2025. Nonetheless, it appears that the only Infinity Comic to be compiled as a graphic novel is It’s Jeff.

DC started off with a different strategy, creating four reader-friendly new series and posting them on the Webtoon platform. They skipped single-issue comics and collected the webtoons as graphic novels, with four multi-volume series: Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, Red Hood: Outlaw, Zatanna & the Ripper, and Vixen: NYC. All have done well in the direct market, and the first four volumes had strong enough bookstore sales to make it onto the BookScan Superhero Top 20 charts (see “August 2023 Circana BookScan”).

However, DC pivoted in another direction in November 2024 with the launch of DC GO on its DC Universe Infinite platform. DC GO is a section of the platform that includes both original vertical-scroll comics (the Webtoon titles plus some new ones, including Harley Quinn in Paradise and Nothing Butt Nightwing) and older comics such as All-Star Superman and Batman: Hush reformatted to be read in vertical-scroll format. In February they added the new Absolute titles to the service (see “DC Does Vertical-Scroll ‘Absolute’ Comics”).

Katie Kubert, Global Publishing Innovation Group Editor at DC, told Publishers Weekly that the reason for shifting to the DCUI platform was to give DC more control. “DC Go is DC behind the steering wheel,” she said. “It's us taking the vertical scroll and applying it to our comics for our readers in both new content and reformatted content.” The new original comics are similar in tone to the Webtoon titles, leaning toward humor and romance. As for the reformatted older titles, the strategy is similar to the new Compact Comics line, making it easier for readers to find classic stories. In other words, DC GO has a dual purpose, to encourage webtoon readers to read some DC comics and to encourage longtime DC fans to try out vertical-scroll comics.

While keeping their webtoons in the walled garden of their own apps, rather than posting them on more easily accessible platforms, may seem counterintuitive, Marvel and DC have an advantage over the creators on the other webtoon apps: Thanks to decades of comics, movies, television shows, and games, both publishers already have a wide audience that is familiar with their products. Kubert told PW that she would like to see the DC GO comics expand onto other platforms, but Jessica Malloy, Marvel’s VP of Marketing, Marvel Digital Media, told ICv2 in a 2023 interview that “we like the ability to have a dialogue with our readers and react more quickly by having Infinity Comics on our own comic platform” (see “ICv2 Interview: Jessica Malloy”).

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