[Photo&] ENHYPEN Breaks Through to Its First Ever Comic-Con—Dark Moon Brings Together a Fandom of 200 Million Views

K-pop idols have made their first entry into San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC), the world’s largest pop-culture festival. The protagonists are the group ‘ENHYPEN’. On the 23rd (local time), they attended the event at the San Diego Convention Center in the United States as panel guests and met the global fanbase of the mega-hit webtoon ‘Dark Moon’, which has surpassed cumulative views of 200 million, proving new possibilities for K-content expansion.

Myth of 200 million views: K-Story IP at the center of Comic-Con

At the core of this global move is ‘Dark Moon’, a HYBE original story that reflects ‘ENHYPEN’’s world. The webtoon ‘Dark Moon: Altar of the Moon’, which follows the story of vampire boys, set an astounding record of 200 million cumulative views worldwide, and the world is now expanding into all directions through secondary creations such as animation and web novels. The members’ real personalities and tastes are woven with precision into the characters, showing an evolution in which fans consume it not only as a musical experience but also as a form of storytelling. During the panel talk, member ‘Jungwon’ emphasized the perfect synchronization between the IP and the artist, saying, “The characters feel more like us than we do.”

Fans who broke boundaries answered with costume play in San Diego

The ‘Dark Moon’ booth dedicated to the work at the SDCC site turned into a melting pot where K-pop and comic fandoms blended. From local fans who hand-made and wore the uniforms featured in the work to fervent teenage fans who visited the Comic-Con booth one after another following a San Diego world tour concert, a wide range of people kept stopping by. In particular, beyond ‘Engene’, the fandom of ‘ENHYPEN’, even general comic readers who did not know K-pop were captivated by the animated trailer on the front of the booth and came to a stop. Park Tae-ho, the business representative of HYBE Next Entertainment Business Division’s ‘Park TaeHo’, said, “We confirmed the explosive local interest in ‘Dark Moon’—enough to make any concern about a K-pop idol’s first-ever entry into Comic-Con seem irrelevant.”

A meeting with a “Twilight” master: a global bond around the vampire world

Among the many artist-collaboration story IPs that HYBE has rolled out, the reason ‘Dark Moon’ delivered a standout performance is the universal box-office buzz code of ‘vampires’. To prove it, this panel talk brought together ‘Catherine Hardwicke’, the director of the ‘Twilight’ film that sparked a global sensation in 2008, along with actors ‘Peter Facinelli’ and ‘Ashley Greene’, who delved in depth into the deadly allure of vampire narratives. ‘ENHYPEN’ members praised ‘Twilight’ as a work that awakened the public to vampire fantasies, and they highlighted the strength of a world that can captivate mainstream audiences intuitively without need for complicated extra explanations. Member ‘Sunghoon’ added that “Even when you transform into a bat in a music video or display superhuman powers, narrative persuasion comes naturally because the public already recognizes the premise of vampires,” adding to the IP’s shrewd strategy.