The short answers first: manhwa is Korean, manhua is Chinese, and manga is Japanese. All three words mean "comic" in their own language. Long strip is not a country at all — it is a layout, where a chapter is one continuous vertical image you scroll through on a phone instead of pages you turn.
Is manhwa Korean or Chinese?
Korean. Manhwa (만화) is simply the Korean reading of the same two written characters that Japanese reads as manga and Mandarin reads as manhua. One word, three pronunciations, three comic traditions. Chinese comics are manhua — not manhwa.
The confusion is reasonable. The words look alike, and on most apps Korean and Chinese series both show up as full-colour vertical scrolls that are hard to tell apart at a glance. The reliable tell is the script in the raws: Korean uses hangul, Chinese uses hanzi, Japanese mixes kanji with kana.
What does "long strip" mean?
Long strip means the vertical-scroll format: one chapter rendered as a single continuous image, often tens of thousands of pixels tall, read by thumbing downward with no page breaks at all. Pacing is controlled by empty space rather than by page turns.
It is a genuinely different storytelling grammar from paged comics. A paged comic creates a beat by making you turn the page. A long strip creates one by making you scroll through a stretch of nothing — those two extra swipes are the pause the artist wrote.
"Long strip", "webtoon format" and "vertical scroll" all describe the same thing: continuous, top-to-bottom, unpaged.
So what is a webtoon?
Webtoon (웹툰) started as the Korean word for a web-published comic and now carries two meanings: the vertical-scroll format in general, and WEBTOON specifically, Naver's platform. People use both senses interchangeably and context almost always makes it clear.
The differences at a glance
- Manga (Japan): usually black and white, paged, read right to left, frequently vertical text and heavy hand-drawn sound effects.
- Manhwa (Korea): usually full colour, mostly long strip, read left to right.
- Manhua (China): usually full colour and long strip, though paged series exist too.
- Webtoon: the format name for vertical scroll, used by Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Western creators alike — and also a specific platform.
- Long strip: the same thing as webtoon format, phrased descriptively.
Other terms you will run into
- Raws: the original, untranslated scans.
- Scanlation: a fan-made translation, from scan + translation — unofficial, and the reason most English-readable back catalogues exist at all.
- Cleaning: erasing the original text and rebuilding the artwork it was covering.
- Typesetting: laying the translated text back into the bubbles.
- SFX: sound effects drawn into the art itself rather than set in a bubble — the hardest part of any comic to translate.
- Panel and gutter: the individual frame, and the white space between frames, in paged comics.
- Tankōbon: the collected volume a serialised Japanese manga is bound into.
Why any of this matters for translation
Because the format decides where a machine goes wrong. With paged manga the hard part is reading order — right to left, panels interlocking, and if the order is read wrong the dialogue is simply scrambled. With long strip the hard part is size: a chapter tens of thousands of pixels tall will lose text in the middle if it is fed to OCR in one piece, so it has to be segmented first.
Text direction differs too. Japanese manga often runs vertically in tall narrow bubbles; manhwa and manhua are almost always horizontal with rounder ones. Translation length then either bursts the bubble or leaves it half empty. And because long strip is full colour, erasing the original text means rebuilding detailed artwork underneath — considerably harder than patching black-and-white screentone.
The first thing to check in any comic translation tool is whether it knows what format it is looking at. Treat a long strip like a paged comic, or read a manga left to right, and nothing careful you do afterwards will save it.
Trying it
PicTranslate's Manga Mode detects bubbles, handles vertical text and right-to-left reading order, and redraws the translation in place. Long strip chapters are segmented automatically so text in the middle of a tall image is not missed. Upload one chapter and you will see where it stands.
