The Manhwa Adaptation That Keeps Failing to Launch

One of the earlier manhwa to be published through Naver Corporation’s WEBTOON platform, and among the very first to get an official English translation at the launch of Line WEBTOON in 2014, is a series many current fans of manhwa may not have heard of unless they were there at the peak of its popularity. In this current time, when we can enjoy the anime adaptations of several high-profile manhwa titles, the name “Noblesse” might not cause too many pairs of ears to perk up, but those who were lucky to have caught the series during its twelve-year run from 2007 to 2019, know of a gorgeously illustrated dark fantasy manhwa that had all the makings of a generational hit; one that may have been one of the first examples of Crunchyroll’s attempts to produce an anime based on a manhwa or webcomic.

Noblesse was one of the first ripples in the current wave of manhwa and webcomic anime adaptations that is currently being led by A-1 Pictures’ Solo Leveling, directed by Shunsuke Nakashige, yet despite being such a phenomenon in its own right, the series seems to have been relegated to obscurity. Noblesse should have been a bigger deal, but it seems as if it wasn’t. Why?

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About Noblesse

Plot and Background Information

Noblesse follows a powerful “noble” vampire, Cadis Etrama di Raizel, better known as “Rai”, after he awakens from an 820-year-long nap in an abandoned building somewhere in South Korea, to find that humanity has taken over the world, invented countless works of technology and is now thriving. He has no understanding of the current world but has his most loyal servant, who has been masquerading as the headmaster of the local Ye Ran High School, to rely on, using that connection to begin attending the school disguised as a student.

There he meets and befriends the highly athletic Shinwoo, the computer geek Ikkhan, Shinwoo’s crush Seo Yuna and various others, but their proximity to him exposes them to all kinds of dangerous supernatural entities as they work together to uncover the secrets of an organization called “The Union”, which seeks Rai’s blood for an unknown cause.

The series was written by Son Je Ho and illustrated by Lee Kwangsu, running from December 2007 to January 2019. Noblesse has several adaptations into animation, the first time being the 37-minute “aeni” adaptation of 2015 titled “Noblesse: Beginning of Destruction“, produced by South Korea-based Studio Animal, which was revealed at the 17th Bucheon International Animation Festival. It was followed by the 31-minute 2016 ONA produced by legendary anime studio Production I.G. (Ghost in the Shell, Haikyuu!), Noblesse: Awakening, which was released to Crunchyroll and YouTube.

This iteration covered the first volume of the manga and was heavily abridged, with several small changes to the story, and it served as the prequel to the twelve-episode Noblesse television anime, which was first announced at Comic Con Seoul in 2019, produced by the same staff at Production I.G., with Shunsuke Tada serving as chief director, and Yasutaka Yamamoto as director, and aired from October to December 2020. The Noblesse television anime adapted events from the second volume of the manhwa.

A Glimpse into Korean Comics At The Time

Noblesse’s Significance to Modern Manhwa

When it was announced that there would finally be a television anime adaptation of the Noblesse manhwa, one that was licensed by Crunchyroll, it was a big deal not just because Noblesse was one of the biggest manhwa in history at the time, but because manhwa anime adaptations, particularly into television series, was a particularly rare occurrence. This isn’t to say that manhwa adaptations into anime never happened, because manhwa began to rise to prominence in the early 2000s, and Blade of the Phantom Master (2004) was one of the first manhwa anime adaptations, but it wasn’t until around 2007 that the idea of “webtoon manhwa” really took root.

While the traditional manhwa scene was going through a renaissance in the 2000s, online manhwa grew in prominence and popularity, with the familiar “scrolling format” slowly emerging in the era’s webcomics. With the establishment of Naver in 2005 and the concurrent emergence of online versions of manhwa in parallel to traditional manhwa led to a situation where both formats were enjoying long-running smash hits.

Jeon Geuk Jin’s seinen martial arts classic, The Breaker, was serialized in Daiwon C.I.’s Young Champ’s magazine in 2007, with black-and-white pages that read from left to right in an industry that was heavily inspired by Japanese manga, and emerging online around the same time was none other than Noblesse.

While both were highly prominent in Korea, exemplifying the height of success on either side of the developing Korean comic industry, The Breaker became a cult classic overseas, while Noblesse was more of a mainstream global success when it became the first manhwa to be officially translated into English when Line WEBTOON launched in 2014.

What Do You Mean, “Failure to Launch”?

Once a Forerunner, Now in the Background

By now, it must sound ridiculous to consider that a title this emblematic of the Korean comic industry and the digital age of comics in general a “failure to launch”. However, the next part in the development of the phenomenon that was Noblesse should have been the locking down of a long-running animation adaptation, particularly when looking at the significance of the series to modern manhwa overall, and the fact that its brilliantly colorful art made it a powerful alternative to the gripping, gritty story being explored in The Breaker at the same time. In essence, the Korean comic industry was in the middle of an important battle between its own Goku and Vegeta; one which pitted the traditional against the modern, and served as another arena upon which the “Great Battle Between Analogue and Digital” of the late 90s and early 2000s was waged.

As an industry inspired by the way the Japanese industry does certain aspects of manga distribution, an important moment in Korean animation; one that could have put the country’s animation industry, which exports countless professionals who go on to help create some of the most well-known pieces of animation in various industries across the world, on the global stage and cemented its place as a hub of animation.

The failure of Noblesse to claim this position of indisputable greatness after winning the battle against traditional manhwa, is the failure to launch in question. With no word of a second season since the 2020 airing of the Noblesse anime, and the disappointing way the manhwa ended, there’s a glaring missed opportunity that is now being fully enjoyed by the likes of Solo Leveling, one of many titles enjoying immense success on the path that titles like Noblesse once forged.