it can take a lot of time and effort physically and mentally to create just one chapter for artists so having to pump out multiple chapters on top of their every day lives eventually catches up to them. Even if they take good care of themselves you still get issues like hand and wrist pain. There’s also an incredible amount of stress and pressure from outside parties to get chapters done on time, people can get sick off of stress alone.
I mean.... Kakao literally push Roxana's artist until she got miscarriage, she had to BEG to let her rest for a couple of weeks (kakao is just BAD BAD company, i could yap abt this, but not now...)
So yeah by this point, you should know how harsh the conditions for all those artists especially in the manhwa, manga, manhua industry.
I remember, there's this art convention about the reality of being webtoon artists in south korea. It's brutal, sometimes they even have to work for 48-hours almost nonstop, the corporate "studio systems", where they have strict quota, etc like for example, the editor need to push the artist where you can only post this many panels in one chapter, that's why when you read a manhwa from a novel adaptation, the pacing could be off. It's because of that.
The platform algorithm too. It didn't help much either. Sometimes they pushed the artists soooo bad like, "you have to enter this week top ten, yadayada or your story have to end in this or that chapter". There's even this journal called, "Platformisation and precarity: the restructuring of creative labour in South Korea’s webtoon industry"
Now, in the manga industry. Gosh... How do i started? Well the weekly update is clearly a HUGEEEE burden especially from shounen demographic manga. For example, you can check out a few last chapters of that manga when it was their weekly update (before the manga ended), they literally pushed Gege-sensei to draw eventho he was literally in a fucking hospital, some even say they pushed him to draw using his non-dominant hand cause his dominant hand literally injured, so yeah, the weekly-chapter was literally just "doodle" but THEY STILL HAD TO POSTED IT
Manhua? Don't get me started. You know how crazy the art for "heaven official's blessing" there's this rumour that STARember got burned out so bad, she have to leave the project. Idk abt this one, but I'm not even surprised if this is true. The manhua had to be put indefinite hiatus. You know the manhua "little mushroom"? The artist got MASSIVE CYBER BULLYING, they had to paused the manhua. The industry itself is already crazzzzy but the "fans" are also not helping either.
It didn't happend in CHN, KR, or JP, but there's this artist from a certain country in South East Asia. She used to be an indie one, making her own platform, even make a bunch of social media accounts (on twitter and Instagram) for each of her OC, so imagine like 5-10 different characters from her comic got their own style in all those accounts, she has to "act" like their different personalities. She signed up with Webtoon later. Then things happened. After the contract ended, she CAN'T use all those social media that she built for hew OWN original characters. It's like the "distribution rights" stay with webtoon forever.
So yeah, I'm glad all those artists didn't kill themselves at one point.
why are all these authors sick