Gumiho, a nine-tailed, seductive vixen from South Korea's traditional horror tales, may soon make her international debut online in the 21st century.

She will likely join Captain America, the Hulk and Iron Man in the official Marvel Heroes lineup, thanks to her appearance as White Fox in the "Avengers: Electric Rain," a webtoon series co-created by the Walt Disney Company and South Korea's No. 2 Internet portal provider Kakao Corp.

Naver Corp., the operator of the country's top Internet search engine bearing the same name, has won the exclusive rights to publish Cyber Force, produced by renowned U.S. cartoonist Marc Silvestri and scriptwriter Matt Hawkins via its global webtoon application Line Webtoon.

Such collaborations are one of the latest moves seen by South Korean web portals setting their sights on overseas markets as sellers of digital comics, which draw a stark contrast to how they had approached foreign markets till now.

When Naver and Kakao kicked off webtoon services in offshore markets about a year ago, they were eager to sell a handful pieces that were popular on home turf to other countries, with translations.

But simply exporting the local content soon revealed its limits, said Cha Jung-yoon, a spokesman from Naver, since it overlooked the "cultural codes."

"It was important to have the cultural consensus, which was not easy to share with international readers on homemade webtoons," he says.

So a two-pronged strategy has become the norm. Selling Korean-made web comics overseas is one, while a localization approach via tie-ups with media partners abroad is another.

Naver has lately been more focused on the latter. It began to host a regular contest on a mission to find webtoon rookies in the U.S., who will serialize their works on Line Webtoon if they win the competition.

In July, the company clinched a partnership deal with Pow!

Entertainment Inc., through which Stan Lee, legendary former Marvel Comics editor and a Pow! Entertainment founder, has agreed to take part in the assessment and selection process of the contest winner.

"Since we as a platform provider have helped local webtoonists earn their fame, we believe we can do the same abroad, which hopefully would in turn help us expand footing there," Cha said.

Naver launched Line Webtoon in July last year servicing some 92 webtoon series for overseas readers, translated in English and Chinese. After a little more than a year, the number of series has now surged to 372, available in four languages including Thai and Indonesian.

Kakao, which hasn't made a separate app for its webtoons, has joined forces with California-based webtoon-only portal startup Tapas Media to provide some of the most popular series to U.S. readers.

The company trained its sights on China early this year, clinching tie-ups with four major Internet portal operators there to service some 40 webtoons to a market with 1.2 billion potential users.

According to Naver and Kakao, English-speaking regions show a high readership for the fantasy genre, while thrillers have gained good traction in China, and romances are loved by Taiwanese.

However, regarding the web portals' localization strategy, some experts here have raised concerns that it may hinder Korean webtoonists seeking to make inroads overseas, since the two Internet portal giants could ultimately land themselves the easier job of delivering local comics made in a foreign country to their native consumers.

Portals refute the claim, saying that the business tie-ups are essential in "making the market first."

"Few know (in other countries) what a webtoon is, to start with. They're amazed to see a piece of cartoon on your smartphone that you scroll up and down to read. For it to become global content, creating and expanding the market will be of our prior concerns," Kakao spokeswoman Hong Sun-young said. 

Local media have recently churned out flattering reports lauding the phenomenon of Korean webtoons tapping into global markets as the next hallyu, or the Korean Wave.

The reality is that it's still at a budding stage.

"The webtoon becomes a complicated business (overseas) and we're in the process of exploring various things in different markets," Hong added. 

Although market watchers paint a rosy picture of Korean firms'

bid for global webtoons, they stress that its success hinges on how much they can turn it into a value-added business.

"A webtoon is good raw material for 'one-source, multi-use', like a webtoon made into a movie. The extent to which it can be re-created into another genre or a secondary product will be key to driving its global success," Seong Seung-chang, a researcher at KT Economy & Management Institute, said.

According to the institute's report, South Korea's webtoon market is forecast to grow twofold to 880 billion won ($771 million) by 2018, given the webtoon's potential as a raw content material and key export item in the media content sector.

Kim Young-gak, an analyst at Hyundai Securities Co., said webtoons have strong growth potential as a global business, given the estimate that there are at least 1 billion potential readers around the world.

"It's worth noting that the digital comics market worldwide expanded to a size of $990 million this year from $480 million in 2009. There's a plenty of reasons for webtoons to go global." (Yonhap)