Webtoons turned Asia's comics market upside down. Now Indian platforms are betting that the next wave of readers will scroll their stories in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
India's comics culture is shifting from print to phone, and one of the clearest signs is Toonsutra, a mobile webtoon comics platform from Graphic India. Variety reported in March 2021 that Toonsutra would launch in April that year, offering both standalone comics and exclusive original web comics.
Its launch slate leaned on recognizable Indian properties, including original webtoon comics tied to S.S. Rajamouli's Baahubali film franchise, the animated series The Legend of Hanuman, and Chakra The Invincible, the superhero franchise created by Stan Lee and Graphic India co-founder Sharad Devarajan. The app also carried titles from US publisher Valiant Entertainment, such as Bloodshot, Shadowman and X-O Manowar.
The format itself is borrowed from Asia. As Variety noted, the concept of webtoons originated in South Korea in 2003 and spread across China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, with major brands including Naver, Line and Kakao. Devarajan said top webtoon apps had cumulatively reached over 70 million monthly users and more than 100 billion views a year.
Toonsutra was not the first to test the Indian market. In 2019, Kross Komics, a subsidiary of the Korean producer Kross Pictures, launched in India with content largely from China, Japan and Korea and had notched up 200,000 downloads, according to Variety.
The funding followed the traction. Reporting indicated that Toonsutra closed a 3.2 million dollar seed round led by the German media group Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, whose companies include Macmillan Publishers and Springer Nature. The round also included the venture funds GMJP and T-Accelerate, Google, and Graphic India.
By the time of that announcement, Toonsutra described itself as the number one comic app in India in both the Apple and Android stores for over ten months, with more than two million downloads. The company is led by co-founders Sharad Devarajan and Vishal Anand.
Its core strategy is language. Toonsutra positions itself as a premium webtoon comics app dedicated to Indian audiences with Hindi, Tamil and Telugu content, aimed at what it calls India's market of more than 700 million mobile youth. The platform says it has partnered with global publishers to assemble more than 3,100 titles and over 500,000 episodes in an easy-to-read vertical-scroll format optimized for mobile.
Whether Toonsutra ultimately leads the category or simply helps open it, the broader trend is clear. The vertical-scroll, mobile-first, regional-language webtoon is becoming a serious new home for Indian comics, sitting alongside both legacy print publishers and a generation of digital-native creators.
Reported by Variety.
