India’s first of its kind destination for comic lovers, Kross Komics is the newest way of storytelling which diversifies your imagination, giving you an all-new experience of the comic world. After being out on Google Playstore for just six weeks, the app has already garnered 200,000 downloads.
Talking to AnimationXpress, Kross Komics president and CEO Hyunwoo Thomas Kim said, “When I came to India five years ago, I went to a local book store and was surprised to see comics being targeted only to kids. And, that was the beginning of my journey of bringing comics for Indian adults.”
Kim assembled the team last year and finally launched India’s first webtoon app at the Comic Con on 7 December 2019. The target market for the app is generally between 15 to 24 year old youths, particularly females.
The first batch of comics includes 40 titles, all from Korea, but by the end of 2020, the Kross Komics team plans to get on board 100 titles from Korea, China and Japan. The app covers around nine genres covering horror, romantic, comedy, action, thriller, sci-fi, mystery, and drama, available in English and Hindi.
“Siddharth is a comic fan and so are his team members. His job here is to work on getting local Indian artists on board. I can bring expertise and experience of creating webtoon and what he can bring passionate individual artists. Then we can combine the passion, artwork and the expertise to create something that does not exist yet in India,” Kim added.
Kross Komics Indian representative Siddharth Raikar will look after the marketing strategies to make the app reach a larger number of audience. “Marketing for a category which is till date known only for kids and making it known to adults is a big challenge, but we will be tackling that. Eventually we will be looking at getting local artists onboard with original stories having Indian context.”
Kim started off in India as a producer and has worked with big names from the Bollywood industry. The third phase for the company is to produce the popular local comic titles into films. “If all three phases take off, we will have a very effective content ecosystem,” he mentioned.
After interacting with Indian youth and thorough research, Kim thinks that India is a perfect market for this app as the youth here is not yet exposed to webtoons. Another reason to bring the app to India according to Kim is to make an ecosystem for the artists, where they are respected and recognised as professionals.
Well, comic lovers out there, you can also share your work through a function in the app and you never know, it can be produced in a film too!
