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Tag: KOCCA

  • World Webtoon Festival Opens to Massive Crowds in Seoul

    The 2025 World Webtoon Festival kicked off on October 19 at Lotte Town in Jamsil, Seoul, attracting an impressive 42,000 visitors on its opening day.

    According to the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), over 200,000 people are expected to attend during the four-day event, marking a 2.5-fold increase from last year.

    The festival aims to bring mobile webtoon content into physical spaces, showcasing the global competitiveness of the K-webtoon industry. Exhibits span over a century of Korean comic and webtoon history — from political cartoons of the 1910s to digital webtoons of the 2000s — allowing visitors to experience the evolution of the medium through live drawing shows and hands-on workshops.

    Pop-up stores for hit titles such as Lookism, What It Means to Be You, The Remarried Empress, and Maru is a Puppy were fully booked in advance, demonstrating the massive popularity of K-webtoons. These collaborations with fashion, fragrance, and F&B brands also highlight the growing potential for webtoon IP commercialization.

    Industry experts view the event as a major step toward creating a global festival that embodies K-webtoon identity.

    Veteran webtoon artist Lee Jong Beom remarked, “If the festival establishes its own brand identity like New York Comic Con, it could become the representative global event for K-webtoons.”

  • Inside Korea’s Ticket Scalping Problem — Even Free Concerts Have Black Market Sales

    Despite the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) labeling ticket scalping as a “social evil” and launching crackdowns, illegal ticket resales continue to thrive online.

    For the upcoming NCT WISH concert, scheduled from October 31 to November 2, VIP seats priced at 198,000 KRW (≈ $150) are reportedly being resold for as much as 1 million KRW, over five times the face value.

    Government data shows that ticket scalping reports surged from 359 cases in 2020 to 4,224 in 2022, a tenfold increase. In 2023 and 2024, 2,161 and 2,224 cases were filed respectively, with 1,020 reports already recorded in 2025 (January–August). Even at free events such as Cho Yong-pil’s concert, scalped tickets were sold for 100,000 KRW, reflecting the scale of the problem.

    However, enforcement remains challenging. Under current law, authorities must prove that tickets were purchased through fraudulent means such as macros and then resold for profit — a standard that ticketing platforms find nearly impossible to verify. Although the MCST announced plans to amend the law last year to penalize resales regardless of macro use, the revision has yet to take effect. Since 2023, only 5.6% of reported cases have been deemed valid for prosecution.

    Shockingly, the Korea Creative Content Agency’s Fair Trade Center currently employs just one staff member dedicated to ticket scalping cases, who also handles other duties. Officials stress the urgent need to increase manpower and establish a real-time monitoring system to curb the ongoing issue.