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By Mark Russell

Imagine the worst criminals mankind has ever produced, exiled to an island completely cut off from the rest of humanity. When a giant pharmaceutical company has its controversial new drug stolen by someone from Sodo, they send in Naomi and a team of agents, to find out what happened and to get their drug back.

This is the mysterious and dangerous set up of Hyung Min-woo’s latest graphic novel / web comics series, “Ghost Face”. “Ghost Face” first appeared in Korea in 2009, and since then two more volumes of the Korean online comics have come out, with a fourth and fifth on their way soon.

But all five will be coming out in the coming months in the United States and around the world, thanks to Tokyopop. (Actually, the first two volumes of the Korean web comics have already been translated into German and published).

Hyung, of course, is the writer and artist behind the huge Korean web comic hit “Priest”, which has been translated into 15 languages and been a bestseller all over the world. It is probably the most successful Korean web comic internationally, and is set to be released as a big-budget, 3D movie next May.

I have been thinking about Hyung’s web comics since running across the “Priest” app on Apple’s iTunes store. For several months now, Tokyopop has been publishing “Priest: Genesis”, a reprinting of the earliest Priest stories, on iTunes. There are 35 issues out so far, and there will be about 85 by the time the “Priest” movie is released.

While the “Priest” online comics are famous for its dark, horror-tinged tale of demons and angels in the American Wild West, the movie appears to have gone in a startlingly different direction (as you can see in the trailer at the movie’s website). Instead of being set in the past, the movie is in the future, instead of angels and demons, it features vampires, and instead of gothic horror, it is more action.

But rather than fight with Hollywood over their vision for “Priest”, Hyung and Tokyopop had a much better idea – they tied together the two stories so they worked together. The result is “Priest: Purgatory”, a full-color limited online comics series. The print version is being timed for release with the movie next spring, but you can read the online version in just a couple of weeks (hopefully).

Anyhow, you can check out the Priest app at iTunes here:

Of course, Tokyopop is not the only publisher bringing Korean comics to the Internet. In Korea, web comics have been a leading trend for a solid decade now, with many of the biggest artists working first and foremost online. The biggest Korean online comics portals have catalogues in the tens of thousands and pull in huge audiences in the hundreds of thousands (and millions, for big new releases).

Korean comics have been slower to bring their online versions to the West. But that is changing. In addition to Tokyopop, a Korea-based start-up called ISeeToon (www.iseetoon.com) says that it has cleared Apple’s app store application process and will be available for downloading soon. ISeeToon will be presenting seven Korean manhwa series in the next year, starting with the web comic fantasy “Magician”.

The company hopes to capitalize on the growing popularity of Korean content in general. “Culture fans usually enjoy several kind of content,” says IseeToon manager Kim Jin-Sung. “Music fans could be TV drama fans, game fans could be music fans. Maybe they didn’t experience Korean manhwa yet, just because they don’t know such culture exists, so they could be good customer targets.”