Dr. Dal Yong Jin is Distinguished SFU Professor. He completed his Ph.D at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Jin’s major research and teaching interests are digital platforms and digital games, globalization and media, transnational cultural studies, and the political economy of media and culture.
By employing media convergence supported by transmedia storytelling as a theoretical framework, Dr. Jin will historicize the emergence of weboon culture. It divides the evolution of webtoon culture to big-screen culture into three periods according to the surrounding new media ecology developed in Korea. It then investigates how webtoons have become a resource for transmedia storytelling. Finally, it articulates the reasons why webtoon culture is becoming big-screen culture with the case of “Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds”, which has transformed from a popular webtoon to one of the most successful movies.