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A Historic Announcement at San Diego Comic-Con
On July 24 (local time) at the San Diego Convention Center during San Diego Comic-Con 2026, an exciting announcement captured industry attention: Marvel Studios and Webtoon Entertainment are co-producing brand-new Marvel original series in vertical-scroll webtoon format. Three titles were unveiled, all based on the Marvel universe but presented as spinoffs of existing beloved characters.
Tony’s First Romance: A Departure From Superhero Tropes
“Tony’s Girl” reimagines Iron Man’s Tony Stark at 17, capturing his first love with Meredith McColl, whom he meets during etiquette class. Notably, there are no suits and no battles—just a first-love narrative. By swapping superhero grammar for romance storytelling, Marvel is signaling its reach beyond traditional comics readers into broader audiences.
X-Men Korea: Mutation Awakens in Seoul High School
The standout title is “X-Men Korea,” which plants Korean soil at the center of the Marvel universe. High school student Go Young-seo discovers she’s a mutant and enrolls in an academy—with Korean characters and Korean settings front and center. Produced under Webtoon Entertainment subsidiary Studio LICO, the project is fascinating because X-Men’s core emotional logic—awakening in beings excluded for their difference—now intersects with Korea’s intense uniformity and competitive pressure. An academy-setting narrative also taps into a genre structure already familiar to Korean webtoon audiences, creating a natural entry point.
Deadpool’s Meta Chaos in Webtoon Dimensions
The third title’s name is itself a joke: “That Time Deadpool Fell Into WEBTOON…and Found The Longest Title of All Time!!!” The plot: Deadpool gets sucked into the webtoon world and tumbles through historical dramas, apocalyptic settings, and fighting tournament tropes—all genre fixtures in Korean webtoons. Pairing Deadpool’s signature fourth-wall-breaking meta-humor with webtoon-platform-as-subject creates perfectly calibrated storytelling.
From Adaptation to Co-Creation
This announcement extends a partnership forged in August 2025 between Disney and Webtoon Entertainment—a deal so momentous that Webtoon Entertainment’s stock jumped over 80% in a single day. Since then, roughly 100 existing titles (“The Amazing Spider-Man,” “Avengers,” “Star Wars,” etc.) have been converted into vertical-scroll format. But this moment marks a critical shift: where prior work represented transplanting completed IP into webtoon format, these three are brand-new creations within the Marvel universe. The relationship has evolved from IP licensor and distribution platform to co-creators. The three series will debut in the Disney section of the North American webtoon app, with individual premiere dates to follow.
Source: Webtoon Entertainment / Marvel Studios announcement, July 24, 2026
