{"id":3480,"date":"2016-03-30T16:57:28","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T23:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3480"},"modified":"2016-03-30T16:57:28","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T23:57:28","slug":"korea-blog-moss-a-star-korean-comic-artists-suspense-tale-serialized-in-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3480","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: “Moss”, a Star Korean Comic Artist’s Suspense Tale Serialized in English"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A young man from the city drives out to the countryside, ostensibly to set in order the affairs of his recently deceased father. But not long after he arrives in the remote village where Dad spent his final years, he decides to stay. On some level, this looks like an example of the kinds of acts of filial piety you\u2019d see in any number of Korean stories, but the circumstances of our protagonist, a certain Ryu Haeguk, quickly get complicated. And in fact, they\u2019d already got complicated before the story begins, what with his having somehow lost his wife, daughter, and career at his relatively early age, thus leaving him free to pursue the suspicions that arise shortly after he meets the cast of shifty-looking creeps who populate the hamlet he now calls home.<\/p>\n

The brief prologue of Yoon Tae-ho\u2019s comic series Moss<\/em><\/a> (\uc774\ub07c) describes Haeguk as \u201cfussy and compulsive, so that small misunderstandings build into major events\u201d \u2014 such as the aforementioned total disintegration of his life in Seoul. But his attention to detail, combined with a borderline-foolish fearlessness we see demonstrated early and often in the story, puts him firmly in the tradition of the ideal mystery protagonist, unable to resist probing into the not-quite-explained until, and indeed well beyond, it gets him into trouble. Here, the process begins with one driving question: why has the village head written off his father\u2019s sudden death, at age 67, as a case of \u201cold age,\u201d not bothering with and perhaps even refusing to order a routine medical examination?<\/p>\n

Haeguk\u2019s increasingly dangerous investigation of his estranged father\u2019s life, the place where it ended, and the people around whom it ended originally ran in Korean between 2008 and 2009, not as a traditional print comic but as one particularly successful example of the made-for-the-web form of comics Koreans call \u201cwebtoons.\u201d It gained such a fan base, in fact, that it became an award-winning feature film in 2010 and did much to make Yoon\u2019s name as one of Korea\u2019s most famous webtoon artists. He\u2019s more recently demonstrated his wide range with the even more popular Misaeng<\/em>(\ubbf8\uc0dd), a webtoon satirizing in the dead-end office jobs often held by Korea\u2019s younger generation, which went on to become a hit television series.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A young man from the city drives out to the countryside, ostensibly to set in order the affairs of his recently deceased father. But not long after he arrives in the remote village where Dad spent his final years, he decides to stay. On some level, this looks like an example of the kinds of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3481,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3480\/revisions\/3481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}