During this year’s Anime Expo, we had the opportunity to sit down with uru-chan, creator of WEBTOON superhero series unOrdinary and OFR – Ice, as well as Brandon Chen, creator of WEBTOON series including Just a Goblin and Overtime Elite, to chat through their experiences as creators on the WEBTOON platform. The exciting roundtable featured multiple outlets, giving the creators the opportunity to discuss their favorite anime/manga series, influences on their work, their personal aspirations, how their work has connected with global audiences on WEBTOON, what’s next for each of their series, and more.
Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.
Creating the World of a Webtoon
To start the conversation, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the process of creating the world of a story. Stories like uru-chan’s unOrdinary map superpowers onto socioeconomic status and explore the consequences of various constructed hierarchies. Stories like Just a Goblin problematize and add nuance to interactions between humans and goblins that are taken for granted in countless other stories. In the case of both of these series, it’s clear that work was put into the structure of the story’s world. Given that, I asked how the two authors approached those structures. Both were happy to give a bit of a window into their creative processes.
“I usually start off with a logline really to build out what the concept is going to be,” answered Chen. “I really care about the characters first and then the world is kind of built around that. So I’ll start with a logline and then from that build out a concept that then helps me understand the character, a little bit about the world. And then I think I like to build out the world as I’m actually scripting out the story. I think a lot of the world building aspect comes as I’m as I’m writing out the story in terms of power systems and all that stuff. That’s all stuff that I’ll maybe predefine before I actually go into deep writing. But basic world stuff and power system is pretty much all I start with. And then all the nitty gritty details I usually build out later on.”
uru-chan noted a somewhat similar approach, saying “I’m kind of similar. For my story, it started off as a contest. So it’s kind of spontaneous. I didn’t really have any idea what the world was going to be like or what the power structure was to be like. I just made two really OP main characters and I feel like I ended up paying for it because I spent the entire story just trying to balance everything. I’m similar to Brandon. It’s also something that I’m kind of learning as I’m writing. And a lot of it is more of me just using logic for — I have stats as well. They range from one to ten. And in my head, it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, what can a one do? What can a ten do in our world?’ And then usually I just balance my power structure around that.”
Learning as they wrote is something that both creators pointed to growth in over time, especially as their writing style and process matured alongside their stories. I was curious whether the two had noticed any specific changes to the way that they approach writing or art since first getting started.
“Yeah (laughs). I don’t think I was very efficient in either writing or art,” uru-chan said. “I think when we speak — when people speak to other people in real life — they speak like this, versus in the story, you have to make sure that every line matters. And not have the characters droning on because you want to save space and you don’t want to bore the audience. That’s not what I did (laughs). In terms of the artwork, it’s like being on a weekly deadline. unOrdinary uploads every week, and then we have to put out an episode every Wednesday. So I really had to think about how I wanted to fast-track my art process. When I first started, I was an illustrator, so I was all about, ‘Oh, I’ve got to put as much detail as possible, I’m going to make this shiny and pretty.’ But now it’s like, ‘Okay, it’s just bare bone lines, and then it’s some flats, and then throw in a 3D background, and that’s it.’ So kind of having to let go of needing to make each panel perfect so that I could just tell the story as efficiently as possible.”
“I do think that this industry is sometimes hard for illustrators at the start, because imagine trying to put out 60 panels a week completely perfect, that’d be really hard,” answered Chen, continuing, “I think for me, when I first did Just a Goblin, I was doing what I thought I wanted to read. And luckily it worked out, but I think now I’m a lot more intentional with the way that characters behave, the way they interact.
Also panel real estate, how many panels are being allocated just for a specific scene, so that it’s not droning on. And really trying to make sure that all the themes I want are coming across and the characters are developing in a way that I want. But also, I think the hard part about doing a long running series, and you [uru-chan] probably know more about this, but how do you keep things like they’re growing, you know what I mean? The stakes are increasing, the characters are evolving. Because if there’s nothing new to tell about the character, then why have them show up at all, right? So I think my journey as a creator has been a lot more about being a lot more intentional, rather than just ‘Hey, this is what I think people would want to read,’ but a lot more intentional with like everything.
As both alluded to in their answers, characters and the way they speak, act, and interact with one another are incredibly important to crafting a proper story. I asked the two specifically about darker arcs and characters, wanting to know how they place themselves in the mindset to create their series’ more evil or morally dubious characters.
“That’s tough,” started Chen. “I think a lot of it comes from me watching other series where there’s crazy villains, or reading the news. When you’re writing these characters you’re almost like an actor. You’re pretending, you’re interpreting and thinking what this crazy person would behave like. And it might not even be completely accurate, but ultimately, our job as the writers to make it entertaining and as semi realistic as possible. And so I think a lot of it comes from just deriving inspiration from a lot of the crazy villains that I’ve seen. In the anime space and in the manga / webtoon space, there’s a lot of archetypes that you can really draw from. So taking those archetypes, doing a little twist on it. Because I’ve never formally met a mass murderer myself. But I can infer from the crazy fictional characters that I’ve seen.”
uru-chan answered next, saying “I have a main character who essentially turns from a good guy to a villain. It’s very similar to what you [Brandon Chen] said, you’ve really got to put yourself in the character’s shoes. But for this character, it was initially just a fun writing exercise. I was trying to make him start him off as the weakest sort of most righteous character and then turn him into the most powerful, villainous character. And I wanted to make that process as smooth as possible. And I think, along the way, as he became darker and darker in personality, I read through a lot of comments. And I could see that people were really relating to him. And so that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, I really need to take his situation and his personality seriously.’ So I actually went and I did research on PTSD, bipolar disorder, all of those things, anything related. And I tried my best to make the depiction of him as accurate as possible. There are also times where I’m writing a scene where there’s a very intense argument between two characters. And sometimes I have to split it into two days, where I put my mindset into one character for one day, and then I have to separate completely overnight. And then the next day, I’ll go into the other character’s mind and write their side. It’s very much getting up close and comfortable.”
When it comes to organization, in addition to the method of splitting a scene across multiple working days, the two creators pointed to different strategies for keeping things on track with world building, in part influenced by their release schedules. Chen answered first, explaining the myriad documents he uses to keep things together.
“I have a document for every single season — Just a Goblin has two seasons and it’s going into its third. So I have a document that highlights what’s happening in those first two seasons. And then I also have what I guess you could call a world Bible. But really simple — no one’s reading that except for me. And that world Bible is really meant for me to just refer back to things and to try and keep things consistent.
But sometimes I’m also too lazy to look back at the world Bible, because now it’s getting too long. So I’m like, ‘I don’t want to read like my own writing.’ So it can be tough. And you (gestures toward uru-chan) probably know, the more complicated your world becomes, and the more — for Just a Goblin, there’s all these different monster races and all this stuff and characters that have different backstories. I always think about like web novelists who have to write two chapters a day. I’m like, ‘How do they remember everything?’ And yeah, a lot of it is tied back to having a world Bible, I think.”
“Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say I don’t,” uru-chan said of staying organized. “It’s hard for me to stay organized because it’s a weekly thing. So a lot of the times I’m kind of just scrambling to get the thing done. I will say that, for me, my grounding point is my characters. And I focus more on their growth and their personalities. So I focus less on the abilities that they use and stuff like that. A lot of the times I will have ‘Oh, yeah, this person’s at a level four right now, a level five right now’ and quantifying that makes things a little bit easier. ‘Oh, this guy’s a four, this guy’s a five. So the five is probably gonna win.’ I’ve been on a break for a while. And so I’ve had time to think about it. And so now I’m able to elaborate a little bit more on the structure of the world and what I want to do with all the characters in the government and the different tiers of the government. So I kind of have something similar to Brandon where it’s like a Bible or just a set of notes that I follow.”
For Brandon Chen, that organization is especially key for writing the number of stories simultaneously that he does. He explained his approach for balancing the creative processes between countless stories at the same time.
“I’m working on five or six or seven series simultaneously. And once upon a time, it was that every day is a different series in a way. I think it kind of still is like that, because I get into a certain zone. For example, Just a Goblin has a completely different tone from Angel Wings and from Samurai No Tora. I get myself into the zone for a certain series by reading a few chapters of some inspirations that I benchmark those series to in a way. So Double Kill, which is a series that’s coming out in August, is benchmarked. I read a lot of Blue Lock and Bleach and Jujutsu Kaisen. And I’ll just read that right before and that gets me in the zone for a certain type of webtoon or series. And so then after that, it just kind of pours out of me. And I always write — when I’m working with WEBTOON early on, we pitch a series and I give them an outline of the entire season pretty much. So I kind of have an idea of where everything’s going to go when it comes into that deeper scripting. I just have to be in a certain zone. I think all the planning that comes out is already done ahead of time. So I don’t have to think an enormous amount unless things are pivoting or changing. And then for the script itself, I’m kind of acting in a way. I’ve got to get myself into a certain mindset. And also I would listen to certain soundtracks that get me into that mood. If I’m writing a fighting scene, I’m listening to the most crazy anime soundtracks.
Anime and Inspiration
Anime soundtracks aren’t the only aspect of the medium that was helpful for these two creators. Both expressed that there were particular scenes, arcs, and moments in popular anime that at least partially influenced or guided some aspect of their series.
“Recently I’ve been I’ve been on hiatus,” started uru-chan. “So I’ve been catching up on a lot of old anime and new anime. And I recently rewatched Yu Yu Hakusho. It’s by the same creator as Hunter x Hunter. And there’s this one arc, the Dark Tournament arc, where literally they just take all the main characters and make them fight a bunch of demons. And there are so many epic fights in there. I think that’s where my spark of, ‘Ok, I want to do action’ came. I watched Yu Yu Hakusho back when I was in middle school, high school. So that’s where like the spark came. Recently, I watched Solo Leveling because I wanted to study the fight scenes. And I mean, this isn’t related to the question, but I was just thinking it’s really cool how far animation has come when it comes to action. But it’s all still equally epic.”
Chen answered next, adding “I think for me, going back to your question, Just a Goblin, the series specifically, I think a lot of it’s about this character trying to find a way to kind of solve this impossible problem, which is world peace. And a lot of that probably came from Naruto. I think when I was younger, I grew up on a lot of Toonami, a lot of Naruto and a lot of this character who is constantly being beaten up and everyone’s telling him one thing, but he’s fighting against what everyone believes is the world philosophy. I think I brought a lot of that into specifically the Just a Goblin series.”
Working on WEBTOON
Speaking to the WEBTOON format, both creators were also asked about the unique aspects of the comic type when it comes to managing gutters (the space between panels), negative space, and the like. Both were more than willing to explain how they balance storytelling and visual pacing in the unique format, with Chen beginning by analogizing reading on WEBTOON to powering a screen with a bicycle.
“I think the format is very unique in the way that — I always think of it as if you’re almost watching a TV screen, and you’re riding a bike, and by biking, you’re making the screen animate. And so instead of the bike, it’s your finger. So yeah, a lot of the gutter in that kind of space helps to — the more gutter you have, the slower pace something can be. You don’t even need to show images. Sometimes it can just be text in a gutter that can help control the pacing. And so for me, I think when I want a really tense scene, I’m pushing the panels together, the text is tighter. I remember I got this one comment, and someone was like, ‘Oh, God, I read this in five seconds,’ right? And I was like, ‘Bro, everyone says that.’ But I was like, ‘What if I just paste it a little bit better?’ And so I started to move some of the panels apart and make some of the panels less claustrophobic. And I thought that it allowed for people to focus more on text when it’s outside of the image, and also focus on the actual images themselves so they can really appreciate the art. So I think that’s possible in the WEBTOON format. I think sometimes with manga and American comics, because it’s page format, you have to cram all those things. When you look at a two page spread, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, so many things.’ And maybe it’s my TikTok brain. But there’s just so many things sometimes. So I think for me, it’s become a lot more about separating those elements. And really making things a little bit more spread out.”
“Yeah, I totally get you with the short comments,” uru-chan answered. “With action it’s all just pictures, right? There’s no text to slow things down. So sometimes I cheat, and I’ll put dot, dot, dot, just so that hopefully people will stick on that screen for a little bit longer than 0.2 seconds, right? I think I was gonna say that with the scroll format, and also the fact that it’s not confined to pages, you have unlimited space to do whatever you want when it comes to action. Which is great, because if you want to show that something is super powerful, for example, you could actually make that panel longer than the screen itself. And by doing that, just the audience having to scroll, the attack being longer than the screen, that kind of gives a psychological indication of ‘Oh my god, this is a huge attack,’ right? And then also during fight scenes, putting emphasis on a character’s expression, right? Like their killing move, their final move. Or when they emerge from the dust clouds, right? And there’s blood all over them, and they’re angry — doing multiple close-ups of that, or just zooming in on that, and really using the fact that, yeah, you can really just focus on one panel at a time. And then I was going to add that it’s also — you [Brandon Chen] said it was like a movie? It is; it’s kind of like a slideshow. So in my head, it’s just like, ‘Oh, okay, if I were to picture this as an anime, what would I want to see?,’ right? Like a slow zoom into like that epic, final pose, to show that emotion and intensity.”
To new creators looking to break into the scene and start publishing content on WEBTOON, the two had this to say:
“So I also mentor a bunch of people,” started Chen. “And there’s also a lot of educational content I put out there. And I think ultimately — the one thing that people come to me and they ask all these questions — I think that you can learn a lot by doing something. And again, this is very similar to the manga industry, where people learn by doing one-shots. And by completing a one-shot, you can do that in manga, you can do that same thing in WEBTOON. By completing a one-shot, you learn how to finish something. And you learn about how that whole production process is. And ultimately, doing a longer series is just doing that, except doing that a lot. And obviously on the writing side, it’s completely different. You have to scale and all that stuff. But from the production standpoint, you just do that a bunch of times and you get better at it. And so I think that a lot of people would benefit by trying to do their own comic. If you’re a writer working with an artist, or if you’re an artist writer, that combination, then you can just do your own project and it can be short. And I think a lot of people would learn a lot by just doing it.”
“Yeah, definitely being hands on and starting,” uru-chan added. “I think that the hardest thing to do is to start. I was also going to say, it’s not easy. And going in I think people should know that it isn’t easy. And that in order to make your way into the space you want to be and stay consistent. You want to make sure you’re uploading at least once, twice a month at a consistent schedule. And don’t get discouraged. Just keep going.”
Chen continued, saying “I think a lot of people — this is me included — started out saying ‘I’m gonna create the next One Piece‘ and were like, ‘Let me create this insane 10,000-chapter-scale thing.’ And a lot of even the top series right now started off as one-shots. Scaled down versions of that IP. You can get there, but maybe don’t start your first chapter or your one-shot with ‘I’m gonna see all 15 oceans and 20 planets.’ I think maybe scale it down. And again, this is also beneficial, even if you’re doing a long running running series first chapter, don’t scare the readers off with all 15 oceans. I think a lot of creators would benefit by just starting small. And again, keeping an open mind of, even if it’s a big concept, starting small within that big concept as well.”
Some wise words from incredibly talented creators. You can find uru-chan and Brandon Chen‘s works on the WEBTOON platform.
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