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Sibauchi
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(Date Posted:09/28/2005 3:22 PM)
Of course there are lots of serious manhwa-in fact, during the 80s even the most cheerful and childish genres had at least several streaks of shades and darkness. (I guess nobody can be entirely freed from his/her environment-this was a time when street demonstrations were everyday life) Lee Hyun-Sae's [The Mercenary Team], a top favourite in the 80s and even made into a motion picture, was about a baseball team made up of social outcasts, and it had this overwhelming gloom and madness to it that I wonder if it could have been as commercially successful in any other time and space than South Korea in the 80s. Most of the soonjung classics are serious sagas (even if some of them are sci-fi or fantasy) ; of course, there are (still) the occasional, typical teen romances that hit it big for a while, but the ones that last in people's memories are such classics. Kim Hye-Rin's [The Sword of Fire] is being made into a stage musical, and works like [Lineage] and [The Kingdom of the Winds] had enough world depth and originality in it that successful online games were based on the books.
The problem, though, is that they tend to be quite lengthy, and serious themes are not often as universal or easy to translate as love romances or action adventures or slapstick comedies. (of course, similar "choices" are made for manga works as well) The manhwas you mentioned are probably in the trend of aiming to produce "high quality(i.e literary)" manhwa as to what the common public thinks. I haven't read them, but it's the kind that will be found in regular bookstores but not in a comic book rental store. Kim Dong-Hwa is one of the few male soonjung artists, and when I was young he mostly drew funny, fantasy soonjung comedies for children, but from a certain point on he moved onto more sentimental, serious works based in nostalgic Korean backgrounds. They're usually criticly acclaimed, although I have no idea how he makes a living off it. And if you look closely, some of the sci-fi and fantasy mahwa that are translated can be serious too, such as [Priest.]
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Life can be a pain. But it ain't that bad, either.
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JennyN
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(Date Posted:09/28/2005 8:46 PM)
Sibauchi, thanks for the information. I guess my choice of title for this thread was a poor one: perhaps I should have said "slice-of-life" or something like that. I've seen LINEAGE and PRIEST and yes, they certainly include serious/dark themes (as do manga, of course). What I was getting at was that to date I hadn't seen much manwha translated that dealt with ordinary contemporary life in Korea in a fairly straightforward way - I mean I enjoy the melodrama of SNOW DROP, but I hardly think that it reflects the average Korean adolescent experience. I simply wondered if the titles I mentioned were atypical, or whether there was a whole school of manwha not yet seen in Europe or the US. After all, even manga titles for adults have only really been translated into French in large numbers in the past 2 years, and there are still very few in English. (I'm thinking of manga like SAY HULLO TO BLACK JACK, SEIZON LIFE, Tezuka's A TREE IN THE SUN and so forth).
Anyway, thanks again and I'll look for the titles you mention.
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jennwenn
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(Date Posted:09/29/2005 10:40 PM)
Thanks for the heads up on the 2 manwha titles! I'm considering buying them in French as well, they sound very interesting. By contemporary, do you know what year they are set? (Like post-war, post economic-boom, post-2000?)
I'm curious to know what Korean "literary" comics would be like, as I've seen so few even among American and Japanese comics. I guess I would enjoy it if the titles are anything like Jiro Taniguchi's works (Walking Man, A Distant Neighborhood, Times of Botchan). He's the only Japanese example I can think of right now lol.
EDIT - Although when I think about it, Taniguchi also has a tendency to use (perhaps overuse?) nostalgia in depictions of life in his manga. Thats at least one potential similarity to the manwha.
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JennyN
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(Date Posted:10/05/2005 7:28 PM)
Reply to : jennwenn
Thanks for the heads up on the 2 manwha titles! I'm considering buying them in French as well, they sound very interesting. By contemporary, do you know what year they are set? (Like post-war, post economic-boom, post-2000?)I'm curious to know what Korean "literary" comics would be like, as I've seen so few even among American and Japanese comics. I guess I would enjoy it if the titles are anything like Jiro Taniguchi's works (Walking Man, A Distant Neighborhood, Times of Botchan). He's the only Japanese example I can think of right now lol.EDIT - Although when I think about it, Taniguchi also has a tendency to use (perhaps overuse?) nostalgia in depictions of life in his manga. Thats at least one potential similarity to the manwha.
BONG GU seems to be pretty much "now". I'm guessing RED BICYCLE could date anytime from the 1980s on (though note I haven't got the books yet: this is from looking at previews).
If you're interested in "literary" manga, I'd suggest Kuroda Io (AN ANDULASIAN SUMMER AND OTHER AUBERGINES), Matsumoto Taiyo (BLUE SPRING, BLACK AND WHITE), Hanawa Kazuichi (TENSUI: THE WATER OF HEAVEN - a very strange tale of a little girl and her kappa friend, with elements of Shinto and folk Buddhism) or Furuya Usumaru (MARIE'S MUSIC). All these are available in French, though as far as I know only Matsumoto has been translated into English as well. Try checking out the website of the Spanish publisher Ponent Mon as well for some interesting titles (they have an English section). I've also enjoyed the French version of a manga based on two novellas by the same author, entitled THE RAILWAYMAN and THE LOVE LETTER - unfortunately I can't remember the writer's name right now. (Can anyone out there do better?)
But, like Matt and others, I feel that Hagio Moto's work is among the best *not* being translated by English-language publishers...
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jennwenn
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(Date Posted:10/25/2005 7:02 AM)
Thanks for all the recomendations. I just bought "Run, Bong-gu". I'll be sure to post my thoughts on it after it comes in the mail! The softer watercolor art in Run appealed to me more than The Red Bicycle, but eventually I would like to pick up that one as well.
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