Three webtoon/manga giants are coming together to form a new studio.
WEBTOON’s LINE Digital Frontier has collaborated with Kadokawa and Redice Studio to create Studio White, a studio that will focus on adapting Kadokawa titles into webcomics which will be exclusive on the WEBTOON platform. The first will be a spinoff of Record of Lodoss War which launches on May 9 on WEBTOON in Korea before it’ll make its way to readers in other languages.
Studio Rice will also plan to publish spinoff stories of Sword Art Online, Slayers, and The Familiar of Zero. Release dates for these three titles have still not yet been announced.
Art for the webtoon-ified Record of Lodoss War can be seen below:
Kim Shin-Bae, the representative director and CBO of LINE Digital Frontier said that Studio White is an avenue to give “global audiences an entirely new way to experience these beloved titles on WEBTOON and LINE MANGA.”
For Jang Jung-Sook, the CEO of Redice Studio, this partnership has given the studio “endless inspiration.” He said, “Our team has poured their hearts and souls into breathing new life into these adaptations. Carefully crafted over many years, we hope readers everywhere will enjoy what we have created together.”
Redice Studio is known for adapting webnovels into manhwa. Some of their works include Solo Leveling, 7FATES: CHAKHO, The World After the Fall, Tomb Raider King, Assassin’s Creed: Forgotten Temple, and Omniscient Reader.
The Record of Lodoss War novel debuted in 1988 by writer Ryo Mizuno. Record of Lodoss War was first created by Group SNE as a Dungeons & Dragons “replay” series that ran in Comptiq from 1986 to 1989 for three issues. Mizuno was excited for the spinoff which will “explore an untold chapter of the war, one that has never appeared in the novels.”
“Honestly, I’m looking forward to reading it myself and discovering what kind of battles unfold through the dynamic vertical scroll format,” he said. “I hope longtime fans will find something new here, and that newcomers will find it a welcoming door into the world of fantasy storytelling.”
Naohisa Yamashita, the director and CO of KADOKAWA Corporation, echoed the same sentiments, calling Record of Lodoss War “an important story to KADOKAWA and in the history of light novels.”
Record of Lodoss War will be available in WEBTOON English soon.
Source: WEBTOON
