Several Korean news outlets, including MoneyToday, are reporting that entertainment giant Kakao plans to shut down Tapas, the North American webtoon platform it purchased in 2021.
Kakao has not released any details yet on this themselves, either on the Tapas site or in their corporate newsroom, leaving many creators and subscribers with questions. The news follows the shutdown of Radish, a U.S.-based web novel site the company also purchased in 2021.
The shutdown comes as Kakao Entertainment is undertaking a broader restructuring of its story businesses. The company has announced plans to consolidate two of its platforms, KakaoPage and Kakao Webtoon, into a single platform by the end of the year.
I’ll add more details on Kakao’s plans for shutting down the site once they release them. “Developing,” as they say.
Tapas has been around in different forms since 2012, when it launched as Comic Panda, a platform for independent webcomics founded by Korean entrepreneur Chang Kim and Young-Jun Jang . The company soon changed its name to Tapastic, a combination of “tapas,” referring to its bite-sized approach to entertainment, and “fantastic.”
In 2014, Tapastic raised $2 million in funding through a partnership with Daum Communications, the Korean internet company whose portfolio included a major webtoon platform. The partnership brought Korean webtoons like Like a Wolf to Tapastic’s English-language audience, helping establish the platform as a bridge between Korean webtoons and the North American market. That same year, Tapastic acquired Webtoon Live, a community focused on vertically formatted comics.
By 2015, Tapastic had more than 5,000 comics on the platform and had raised approximately $3.4 million from American and Korean investors. In 2016, the company launched a new freemium mobile app simply called Tapas, shifting toward the bite-sized, mobile-first reading model that would become central to its business. By 2021, when it was acquired by Kakao, Tapas had more than 63,000 creators, 96,000 series and 1.6 million episodes on the platform, along with partnerships with publishers like Scholastic, BOOM! Studios, Vault Comics and Hachette.
Some of its original series that have since appeared in print include Magical Boy by The Kao, Animalheads by Son M and Sam Curtis, The Flying Ship by Jem Milton and Tomahawk Angel by MangakaOdy. Alice Oseman’s mega-popular Heartstopper debuted on the site back in 2016. It also hosts popular Korean series like Solo Leveling and Villains Are Destined to Die.
Hard to believe this is the same site that launched as Comic Panda back in 2012 and where Heartstopper first debuted. With Radish already gone, it will be worth watching what happens to the print-adapted originals like Magical Boy, and to everything readers have already unlocked.