Korean webtoons have travelled a long way from the smartphone screen. In Los Angeles, a new exhibition looks at what happens when stories created for digital comics move into television, animation, games and other forms of popular culture.

2026 K-Comics Origin Los Angeles: Korean Webtoon Experience Exhibition opened at the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles on September 11 and runs through October 17, 2026.

Presented by the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles in partnership with the Korea Creative Content Agency, the exhibition centres on three Korean webtoons that have developed audiences well beyond their original digital format: All of Us Are Dead, Solo Leveling and Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint.

Taking webtoons off the screen

The exhibition begins with a medium normally experienced in private and on a screen. Webtoons are built around digital reading, particularly the vertical scrolling format associated with smartphones. In Los Angeles, those stories have been moved into a physical gallery.

According to the Korean Cultural Center, visitors encounter characters and key scenes from the three featured works through spatial installations and interactive kiosks. The exhibition is intended to offer an offline way of experiencing stories normally encountered through digital screens.

It also places those works within a broader history. The organisers trace the development of Korean comics over roughly a century and the later emergence of webtoons as a storytelling format shaped by the digital and mobile era.

Three stories that moved beyond comics

The choice of works makes the exhibition’s theme particularly clear. Each has moved beyond its original reading format and into other parts of the entertainment industry.

Joo Dong-geun’s All of Us Are Dead was adapted into a television series. Solo Leveling has expanded through animation and games, while Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint has also developed across different media.

The exhibition uses those examples to introduce what the organisers describe as the “One Source Multi-Use” model: a story and its characters moving from one medium into others and generating new works around the same original property.

In that sense, K-Comics Origin is as much about what happens after a comic becomes successful as it is about the three titles themselves. The original webtoon remains the point from which those later versions begin.

Joo Dong-geun at the opening

The opening programme also brings one of the featured cartoonists directly into the exhibition.

Joo Dong-geun, creator of All of Us Are Dead, was announced as a guest for a special programme at the Korean Cultural Center on September 11. The programme was scheduled for 6:30 p.m. and was billed as an opportunity for audiences to hear about his creative process and the development of his work from webtoon into screen content.

His participation gives the exhibition a useful connection back to the person who created one of the stories now associated internationally with Korean popular culture. Behind the adaptations, franchises and streaming audiences, there is still a cartoonist and an original comic.

A longer history behind the webtoon boom

The international success of webtoons can make the format appear comparatively new. The Los Angeles exhibition deliberately places it within the longer history of Korean comics instead.

That distinction is important. The technology and reading habits changed, but contemporary webtoons did not emerge without a comics culture behind them. K-Comics Origin links that history to a period in which a digital comic can become the starting point for animation, television, cinema, games and character-based products.

For visitors in Los Angeles, the result is also a reversal of the usual experience: works designed to be scrolled through alone on a small screen become something to walk through in a shared physical space.