Out of curiosity I watched the 1st episode. I would say Today's Webtoon is totally a new take with slightly different feel compared to the original.
I personally think their interpretation of FL character is a bit wrong (judging from 1st episode), and they added many new unnecessary scenes that felt like filler to prolong the episode duration. The only best thing/moment from the episode came from the portion of the original material. So it felt unbalance between good writing (from original) and mediocre (+ meaningless) new writing...lol
I also have problem with the pacing. Yeah I appreciate slow pace drama and this is still watchable, but 60 minutes of slow pace for a pilot episode without some deep meaning feels like wasting time. It could be just me though as I have been away from watching Kdrama for so many years and this is my first time in a long time watching a full episode of any kdrama...haha.
At the same time, my main concern/curiosity about this remake is how they want to reapply the printing comic procedure into digital webtoon...I mean story and plot wise. They already made some blunder during the 1st episode for Mr. Baek (the veteran artist, played by Kohinata in J-version).
They said Mr. Baek draws on paper and the assistant would later transfer it to webtoon format. The problem is they show him drawing in "manga frame format". This is basically illogical as the drawing will be converted into webtoon later which don't require framing like in manga...instead webtoon is a series of scroll-able-single-frame drawings.
Secondly, the term "Juhan Shuttai" itself. I'm curious how they would do about this since they clearly claimed that the drama is adaptation of manga...not loosely inspired from it.
What I mean is Juhan Shuttai is a second printing. To have second printing you first need to have a book of manga compilation (tonkobon) to be printed. In order for your manga to be compiled into a book, the manga first need to be serialized in weekly/monthly magazine, and received good feedback from readers. Having released a book doesn't mean a mangaka will get a second printing too without proper marketing. There are clearly hard steps before achieving "Juhan Shuttai" and that's why it was a dream of any editor in the original story.
In digital format, I don't see this is applicable. Yeah you can change it to number of views or subscription, but the journey isn't there. Since digital storage is cheaper and is accessible on demand at any time, there's no need for discriminating popular webtoon with unpopular webtoon. There is also no reason to make compilation, as that's how the webtoons are sorted anyway since it's a platform not magazine that comes with mixed work.
I will try few of next episodes though before deciding to watch until the end or not, but I know I would be disappointed with this remake regardless.
