Digital Comic Series by Kelantan-Born Hanza Have Collective Views of 195 Million

If you’re looking for some thrills and chills, check out this brand new Webtoon series created by a Malaysian, set in Malaysia, and has Malaysian characters. Kelantan-born comic artist Hanza has released her brand-new webtoon ‘The Guy Upstairs’ on 14 October and it has already seen staggering numbers ––– receiving over 4 million views and 620k subscribers in two weeks.

For those who don’t know, Webtoon is a South Korean webtoon platform for posting compact digital comics which is owned by Naver, the country’s version of Google. You may have watched popular Korean dramas ‘My ID is Gangnam Beauty’ and ‘Yumi’s Cells’, which were first released on Webtoon and then turned into TV series ––– and who knows, one day ‘The Guy Upstairs’ may become a screen adaptation too.

In the English-language series, Rozy finds her neighbour, the good-looking guy who lives upstairs on the 13th floor a little bit too suspicious –– is he moving a sack of rice or is he moving a cadaver? Read on to find out… Be forewarned though: the series contains blood and violence. Malaysians will also relate to references in the series such as calling ‘999’ for emergency services, Milo, and the representation of diverse characters such as a girl in a headscarf.

We spoke to the comic artist behind the series who wishes to remain anonymous and only to be known by the pseudonym Hanza.

Real Struggles Every Artist Go Through

She explained, “Like many other artists, I started at a very young age. But I only started drawing seriously and learned more about the industry when I entered a university in Cyberjaya to study 3D animation.” Being exposed to comics from Japan since she was a child such as Doraemon, Detective Conan, and Crayon Shin-chan led her to develop an interest in storytelling and art, and she would even doodle comics on her schoolbooks. 

She shared that unfortunately, a typical mindset that many people have is that anyone aspiring to have a career in the arts will have no future. “People around me would tell me to focus on studies first, and art second. As such, I spent my entire school years being self-taught.”

She has worked her way up from a relatively young age. At age 19, she worked with a few local publishers as an illustrator and then won several local short comic competitions. At the age of 23, she launched her first webtoon series 'My Deepest Secret’, which currently has a mind-boggling 191 million views.

Making Art a Full-Time Career

The 26-year-old has now made creating webtoon series her full-time career. Webtoon pays her on a per-episode basis for the rights to publish her comic series on their website, along with other monetisation benefits.

She explained that like YouTube, creators can earn revenue from their content. Webtoon has a section called called 'Canvas' where anyone from around the world could upload their comics and get money from ads.

But unlike YouTube, Webtoon has an 'Originals' section, in which they pick their favourite comic series from 'Canvas' to be serialised. Once a comic series is serialised by Webtoon, the comic artist gets to enjoy its monetisation benefits. It took her only around six months for her first series to be chosen by Webtoon for its ‘Originals’ section.

Besides getting two of her webtoon series serialised, she received a win and a nomination at the 2020 Ringo Awards which celebrate comics and are held annually at the Baltimore Comic Con in the USA.

Artistic Influences

Like the majority of comic artists nowadays, she draws digitally using Acer Nitro 5, a gaming laptop and Wacom Cintiq 16, a drawing tablet. Her art style is a mix of mainly East Asian comics –– manga, Japanese comics and manhwa, Korean comics.

She said “Growing up, I was inspired by a lot of comic artists from Japan who are known as mangakas. My favourite mangakas at the moment are Yusuke Murata creator of ‘One-Punch Man’ and Kaoru Mori ‘Otoyomegatari’. I've also started reading a lot of Korean manhwas from 2018. My favourites include 'Bastard' and 'Strangers from Hell'”.

A word of warning to other aspiring comic artists though: “I would not say it’s an easy process,” Hanza shares. A single episode consisting of 60 panels usually takes her around two weeks to finish, despite her working eight to ten hours every day. As each episode has a one-week deadline, “What saves me from ‘deadline hell’ is preparing buffer episodes before my comic is due to be published for the week.”

Although there are other Malaysian comic artists on Webtoon –– such as Wishroomness whom she encourages readers to check out –– Hanza is really proud of what she has achieved so far and being able to represent Malaysia.

“'The Guy Upstairs' is my first comic featuring Malaysian characters set in our country. It makes me happy to see how well-received the series is on a global platform and I would love to make another comic set in Malaysia in the future.”

With only five episodes of ‘The Guy Upstairs’ uploaded on Webtoon as of the time of writing, readers can look forward to more Malaysian references in the future and an exciting, hair-raising plot!

We can’t wait to read the other episodes in the series! Check it out here.

Image credit: @twitter.com/az_hanza