Tag: korean comics

Solo Leveling and Jujutsu Kaisen

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A pair of anime darlings in this day and age

It isn’t everyday that new anime debut and take the world by storm… or maybe it is since the audience is starved for a brand new bevy of releases to christen the Big Three of Anime. The western anime fans are still in search of those that can lay Bleach, One Piece, and Naruto to rest and as far as contenders go, the early 2020s have so far seen two of them go back and forth in popularity: Jujutsu Kaisen and Solo Leveling.

JK debuted in 2018 as a serialized manga running for 30 volumes until 2024 and SL started sometime in 2016 and bounced between publishers online as a Korean webcomic until it got a physical release the same week as JK for 14 volumes of its own, releasing its final chapter in 2021. I admit that I was late to the party, coming on for both JK and SL only this year, and I’ve made better progress in the former than the latter, though still stuck on the first season. Not to mention how inconsistent I am with my viewing, so the remainder of this double bill will default to Wikipedia. Starting with the first:

A supernatural story involving yet another orphaned adolescent who gets chosen by a demonic power that doesn’t kill him but lies in his body as a host and comes out to puppet his latent abilities. Of these, is the famed Domain Expansion whereupon an alternate dimension opens up where the user is given free will to do whatever to win the battle. Something something victory is god and the user is pope fare. The orphaned adolescent is pure of heart, innocent Yuji Itadori. His sickly grandfather leaves this mortal plane with a dying message to always stay kind. Easy instructions to follow since that’s all he wants for himself and his friends.

Afterwards, he continues life in high school and runs into people with some of the aforementioned abilities, starting with Megumi Fushiguro.

Fushiguro is what is known as a Jujutsu Sorcerer, part of a secret society of sorcerers tasked with protecting the innocent from ancient evil Curses. One way in which this is achieved is by collecting scattered demon body parts, some of which belong to the worst known as Ryomen Sukuna. In one such encounter, Fushiguro finds students who find Sukuna’s disembodied finger. Understanding the inherent evil in just the severed appendage but not yet knowing how it works, Yuji swallows it whole allowing Sukuna to dwell within his body.

Here, the demon acts as Yuji’s id, or from what I’ve seen thus far, tries to. Yuji still maintains control of the flesh, but will call upon the evil within to get him out of a particularly tough battle. Though he has the powers of the demon at his beck and call, he’s not exactly an expert and in the eyes of the Jujutsu Sorcerers, he’s marked for exorcism and eventually execution. In the series, select individuals — to include Yuji — have the ability to control such evil, and before they become experts in this ability, they attend school at any one of Japan’s government-sponsored Jujutsu Sorcerer academies.

Bearing witness to this course of opening events is Fushiguro’s senpai, Satoru Gojo, who elects to stay the impending exorcism so that Yuji can learn how to control the demon within. The chimp has the rifle, but good luck expecting marksmanship or trigger discipline from the great ape, which is why he initially struggles to perform in combat. After Gojo helps Yuji transfer to the Tokyo branch of the Sorcerer academy, the series gets its proper start in the format we’re all familiar with and those of you who haven’t seen it, if the occult is up your alley, then give it a watch.

Personally, I liked the premise enough to progress to 2/3’s of the way through Season 1. Now, my work schedule has kept me from completely finishing the series and I’m notorious for bouncing between series. I’ve mentioned it yonks ago that I’m not a fan of the binge culture spearheaded by the likes of Netflix and I like to take my time with series, especially new ones. The cost of this is that a lot of time is put between viewings which leaves me to play catch ups in my head or do research prior to picking it back up or both. For what it’s worth, my memory works well enough to keep me from having to do that as frequently save for these blog posts–usually the next episode helps jog that memory.

This era of anime has since done away with the worst forms of Recap Syndrome that have stuck with the medium for decades, and I consider myself lucky enough to have such a memory, but for other people who binge their series, this is probably one of the most inconvenient times to discover anime. At least the pacing hasn’t taken a serious hit, and in some ways has improved due to the direction of the blowing wind now. For me, I maintain that spacing allows me to think about what I just watched, whereas binging gives me a lot all at once and there’s only so much I can take these days.

Back to Demon Hunter School…

…not that one.

The driving force that keeps me from forgetting about the series is the occult nature of it all as well as the drip feeding of Japanese folklore, namely the series’ interpretation of famous Yurei and Yokai mythology. Why didn’t I jump on it as it was popular? Especially since one of my favorites, High School DxD, is the occult with T n A? I don’t chase trends, especially as they air or debut, which is why it’s taken me ages to at least check out My Dress Up Darling for instance. Damn, this castle manor of anime endlessly expands. Did I steal the blueprints for the Winchester mansion or something?

Well, whatever, onto the rest of this double bill with Solo Leveling:

Alternatively titled, Only I Level Up, Solo Leveling has a few occult themes in it, but is merely wearing the skin of a homebrew DnD campaign. Contemporary South Korea has a map of different dungeons that are far too dangerous for the Republic of Korea Army to attempt to clear out by themselves, even with U.S. military aid, but a subsect of people exist with different abilities to help clear them based on their skill level. E-tier or worse? You get s[punch]t. B-tier or better? The dungeons get worse, but you come out better. Sooner or later, you’ll climb out of hell wearing the devil’s skin as a shirt and his head on your hip.

From that description alone, and based on other Korean media I’ve been exposed to, the tropes exist within the Korean online gaming market (sans CS:GO) with monsters and enemies that exoticize the different DnD races while holding back on the East Asian romantic picture of western European court and nobility. The protagonist here is low-level hunter Sung Jin-woo. He gets chosen by virtue of being the last of his hunting party when nearly everyone gets their s[crunch]t stomped in by the monsters and possesses an ability no other hunter has: the ability to level up, thus giving the title its purpose. Every other hunter has their abilities set in stone, but the powers that be choose him to be the one to level up from paltry E-tier to god pulverizing S-tier.

Credit: u/MaxSupreme369, r/SoloLeveling

I wrote ages ago about how historical and political circumstances led to the Korean government to heavily vet and scrutinize nonpolitical media and the likes for any anti-government, pro-North Korean/pro-communist sentiment, which I think severely limited outside exposure to webcomics (along with ancient Internet being even more closed off), and I maintain that these circumstances are why Korean webcomics are still in their discovery era even now as series are still being discovered, despite some of them debuting their first chapters years ago.

For Solo Leveling, a bevy of outside factors seem to have also influenced its central themes. The premise of dungeon raiding has deep medieval European roots, the caste system has medieval Asian roots, and as explained in this video, the concept of killing God and defying fate has specifically Japanese roots. At most, the only thing Korean about the series is its setting, Seoul, its characters having Korean names and abandoning the character design philosophy of “Mukokuseki,” where characters have nontraditional hair and clothing senses so that the viewer can self-insert into their favorite characters. I feel the concept is better used in Japan than Korea given geopolitics, and successive authoritarian Korean governments having a more noticeable thumbprint on what was previously allowed to print.

Fortunately, this hasn’t affected this specific webcomic all that much in a way that was noticeable to the untrained eye. But it still has a few of the same problems from the True Beauty webcomic, in that the main character needs an outside source to become a better version of themselves in order to be accepted by their peers.

I am still speaking from an outsider’s perspective, and if everything I’ve read about Korean culture is even somewhat true than I’d probably look to Europe as a source of freedom from my mundane at best Korean life.

Solo Leveling also deserves a watch for those who enjoy the DnD-ness of its format, but to measure it up against the likes of JK… I still lean more Jujutsu-ward than SL. Both are great in their own right, with interesting characters in a creative and compelling story, but at the risk of throwing Korea under the bus like its neighbors have done so historically, JK pulls me in much stronger than SL. This very blog is evidence enough that I game to a supremely unhealthy degree and if I’m being honest, the games are all the solo leveling I need. This isn’t me saying “I don’t like character arcs,” no sane person would say that; rather it’s me saying that “I don’t find Solo Leveling’s presentation to be my particular cup of tea.” Basically this meme format so as to not mince words:

Still, give it a watch if you wanna see Sung Jin-woo get a comically larger chin without having to Habsburg his way there.

Fat Otaku Today, 10/10 Girl Tomorrow

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Who’s this chick in the mirror? Is that… me?!

You may remember in January when I wrote about my Korean manhwa arc of which a high number of the series put out was pornographic in art. Several series I remember fondly not just for the tits and ass on the page (read: my phone/computer screen), but because of some of the unique premises they played around with. Even some of the very Korean drama-esque stories had something interesting to keep me coming back. Observe:

This one, for instance, called Lady Long Legs, is about a man who pays a debt owed to a businesswoman by becoming her man-servant. There is porn in this one, but slight spoilers, it comes later than you’d think.

Circling back to my post on manhwa, the topic of this post is about a manhwa adaptation I watched in Spring of 2021, a few months out from my first excursion in the Army.

The series is called When I Woke Up, I Became a Bagel Girl and with a title like that, we already have to do a little bit of homework on Korean culture. The term “bagel girl” has nothing to do with bagels, so those of you who were looking out for that, I’m sorry. The best I can do is direct you to the closest bakery or Wawa if you live near one. The term is a play on words of sorts, where bagel girl is a Korean portmanteau of “baby face, glamorous body;” think of it like old cartoons where a smokin’ hot babe is referred to as “babe” or just “dollface.”

The protagonist is a 26-year-old virgin otaku named Bong-gi. No ladies that aren’t plastic or standing in dynamic poses on his shelf, no looks aside from those that cause onions to cry, no hope for the future seeing as he’s in a dead end job, and no confidence unless it’s on a screen in the dead of night. Alright, enough about myself, let’s talk about Bong-gi. Well, a lot of that is true of Bong-gi, so I’m definitely not one to judge. After a s[PS2 bootup]ty day at work, Bong-gi makes a beeline for his PC and games all night, snacking in the process. I mean no hyperbole when I say that’s extremely relatable, at least for me recently.

The next morning, he awakens in his waifu-splashed one-bedroom apartment, clutching his body pillow to answer the door only to discover that there are two large protrusions coming from his chest. He swears on best girl Hestia that he was a man the day before. What happened? Thankfully, he’s also curious or there wouldn’t be a series. An immediate comparison to make for “guy becomes girl” is either Gonna Be the Twintail or Ranma 1/2, but unlike those two series, Bong-gi can’t change gender at will, nor does he have any memory of it happening seeing as it happened in the dead of night while he was fast asleep. It’s also not an action series, but it’s not a pornhwa either, though it does have fun with the genderbend concept.

Just like its concept, the central plot of the series can be considered a bait and switch of sorts. If you went in thinking it was going to be a slice of life, think again. It’s more of a detective series with more beneath the surface than meets the eye. Without spoiling too much of the plot, the entirety of the series is based on this mystery plot with different twists and turns that give it a distinct thriller feel. I’m compelled to compare it to a telenovela or a soap opera.

Now to judge it on non-spoiler-y elements. I read many manga series and watch many anime series, as evidenced by this very blog. Manhwa is still a bit of a blind spot of sorts. As I mentioned above, I had a whole arc dedicated to this medium all through community college, however, but with the animanga scene exploding on its own home turf and abroad, whatever I wanted to watch or read from the Korean side of things has been a struggle. Either there’s not enough of it or it gets buried under a wave of other series from Japan. Tying back to my post on the history of manhwa, local Korean politics may or may not be responsible for this.

The youngest Koreans born under Japanese rule may at best be in their mid-to-late 80s, but the generations following still grew up under a military dictatorship hellbent on warning its citizens of what would happen if they bent the knee to the North in particular and the communists on the whole. As a result, in Korea (and by extension Taiwan), creative minds in both countries have been apprehensive about including anything remotely satirical. Some of the manhwa I’ve read (to include Lady Long Legs) have some reference to a real life Korean concept or even law. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that this was how I learned that the country still has conscription; just goes to show that the true opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference. There wouldn’t be conscription there if they didn’t care about their wacky neighbor (but to be fair, neighboring the hermit kingdom isn’t easy).

I bring that up once again to highlight why manhwa seems to be getting the spotlight only recently. It could simply be Korean politics overpolicing media as a consequence of Cold War politicking; it could be viewers running out of material during the pandemic and reading whatever’s available; it could be a more subtle form of Korean pop culture spreading, sitting side-by-side with K-dramas, movies, and music; it might be all of these or none of these.

For me, it’s along the lines of adding to my fortress of consumable content. I have so many shows and movies in my watchlist that I barely get through all of them. I can watch a few episodes no problem, but I’m not 19 and my days of watching content ’til 2:30 AM are long behind me. Even if I didn’t have the responsibilities demanded of me by the military, I wouldn’t be able to sit there and browse anime to watch anymore. I’ve done it before, and while I haven’t exactly seen it all, the 24-hour binge is far from ideal or even recommended. I don’t even like 24-hour news cycles; you think I wanna watch the same specific series uninterrupted? For this reason, I adopted a method employed by Adult Swim ten years ago: the Double Shot method. It’s a reference to an old Adult Swim promo from the time.

I can’t find any evidence of it online, but as I recall, the programming block aired two consecutive episodes of a certain show for the hour and continue to the next show in it’s line up. For example, King of the Hill would air Episode 15 at 9 and then Episode 16 later at 9:30. The same for American Dad at 10 and 10:30, then Family Guy or Rick and Morty or China, IL at 11 and 11:30, and so on. So far, it’s a sound method that only fails when I feel lazy. Otherwise, it works. This being the second time, I’ve mentioned manhwa, my crystal ball doesn’t say with certainty whether it’ll come up again this year — I only have the first half of this year filled with blog topics — but it does highly recommend the series. As of writing, it’s available for free on Tubi and there’s generally no pressure to sign up if you haven’t already. As for the manhwa, most manhwa hosting sites are gonna be flooded with pop-up ads on the side for a crappy mobile game or porn site, even if you’re not reading a pornhwa. There’s no shortage of them, but I highly advise you be careful where you choose to read this if that’s more your angle.

Also, this series clues you in to how strict Korean beauty standards can be. Most places tend to be like this, but the cultural shock will give you a headache.

My Korean Manhwa Arc

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70% of it Was Porn

Of all the media I’ve covered since this blog’s creation, animanga takes center stage followed by video games, TV, and to a lesser extent, music. And with all that content there’s still a blind spot that not only affects my coverage but also coverage of several other creators. Name any anituber and they’ve covered some of the most popular animanga series to debut in recent or even living memory. Bonus points if they’ve also promoted series that few people ever paid attention to.

I was recommended this on Reddit once when I put the manga Rokudenashi Blues in a 3×3 post. Here’s a video review of it.

Obviously, Japanese manga solos the graphic novel charts overtaking western comics roughly 95% of the time, but Japan’s not the only country producing graphic novels of its own. China has manhua and Korea has manhwa; same concept, different spelling when Romanized. There was a point in my life during the second half of community college that I took in an extensive amount of manhwa along with my manga intake. I remember browsing a porn site late into the night and next to the generic “Hot MILFs in Your Area” pop up ads, there was one that stood out. An ad (or in this case: promotion) of a manhwa hosting site called Toomics.com

I joined it back in 2018, before it put up some fancy new paywalls. Not working at the time, my best way around it for the series I was reading was the age-old “find a manhwa pirate site and hope it isn’t hiding malware in its ads.” On mobile, at least. I was careful not to try anything with my laptop because my mom would occasionally borrow it to complete important work. She did respect my privacy but you can never be too careful.

Toomics was what I’d call a gateway site as far as manhwa. The ad in question was for a manhwa called My Stepmom, interestingly enough. If it wasn’t obvious yet, it was one of the several manhwa series that was porn. I did see it on a porn site, after all. With that came several more manhwa, adult content notwithstanding, and speaking of adult content, a feature of the website is the NSFW filter, so you don’t have to worry about being the subject of a popular copypasta.

I wasn’t joking when I said a majority of my readership was pornographic. For the 30% wholesome, safe for work series, they bounced around between action and dramady, but for some of these, while not explicitly pornographic in nature, they were still intended for mature audiences by covering complicated topics from war to illegal trades to gambling to alcoholism and drug abuse among numerous others.

Then there’s the purely wholesome romcom manhwa where “are they dating? worse they’re stupid” has a full dormitory. Pick your favorites: mine has to be one called Annoying Alice; about office workers starting off with playful teasing only to come together towards the end. Hopefully, that was vague enough to not warrant a spoiler alert. I briefly took a pause from manhwa around the same time as my first go at the Army in 2021. But like with manga, I did come back though I don’t read as much manhwa as I would like.

All that aside, a question I have regarding manhwa is about why I don’t hear more about it. The genre has a dedicated subreddit some 1.1 million members strong, there are numerous legitimate and underground websites hosting the chapters with an untold number of teams hard at work localizing them for the broke and hungry populace, as well as those bringing us the raw scans for those who want a better grasp of Hangul.

Further, this is an argument in favor of Korean culture’s spread throughout the world. Next to K-Pop and K-drama, I believe manhwa is another instance of the Korean Wave or Hallyu spreading, but it gets less attention than the aforementioned, and circling back to Chinese culture spreading–without demeaning or scolding–can you, the reader name at least one C-drama or Chinese manhua? It’s okay if you can’t because neither can I.

This was an interesting find during the 2020 election season.

I only have hypotheses for why manhwa seems so unsung and underground compared to its Japanese counterpart. One hypothesis I have is in some manner connected to how some people find it, or how it finds audiences. I can’t speak for everyone, but with the adage of “sex sells,” a bold (or desperate depending on how you see it) move is to advertise the site and/or a series on a porn site in between the rest of the dreck on the sidebar getting in the way of some scripted T ‘n A. Another I have may be due to the proliferation of manga compared to manhwa/hua, and the history behind adaptations of famous manga. Even since before the Tezuka and Ishinomori days, manga has been a thing and so has anime; and it’s become expected of manga to eventually become anime. Sometimes there’s even a pipeline of light novel to manga to anime. Even movies.

Speaking of history, you’ll notice that Osamu Tezuka’s days were the mid-1940s up until his death in 1989, inspiring future mangaka in the years since. Araki, Toriyama, Kishimoto, Arakawa, Oda, and far too many to list.

The tragedy of his magnum opus was that it took so long to properly adapt it, leaving behind years of lost media in its trail.

Even if a manga is adapted after years in slumber, it’s still more likely to get a wide reach through a faster-paced medium like animation, but most Korean manhwa aren’t as lucky, from what I’ve seen. There’s a few coming out in recent memory like Solo Leveling, Tower of God, and God of Highschool in the last few years, but manhwa is far older than that. I think it may have something to do with the history of Korean politics and its government. Post-war Japan is extremely sedated, and the dismantling of the Japanese Empire meant the ad hoc independence of its former territories, repatriation of its non-Japanese subject, and/or the transfer of its territories to the Allies, the most famous of the lot being Korea split in twain by the Soviets and Americans.

Both were led by unassuming statesmen who had notorious reputations for being ruthless dictators. The South had long been an anticommunist state to the point of carrying a dictatorial slant until true democratization in the late 1980s. I’m prepared to be corrected for this, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that this roughly 40-year post-independence timeline of strongmen had an influence on a lot of Korean culture and popular media. There’s a Last Week Tonight segment on Taiwan and in the latter half of the segment, the dictatorship on the island stamped hard on anything that even slightly criticized or satirized the government. I think Korea had the same issue at the time, overzealously stating its independence and opposition to communism in the face of its neighbors, but at the cost of its inhabitants. In a dictatorship, the freedom to read, write, and speak freely is severely under threat. With that knowledge, aspiring comic artists would’ve had three options: Comply with Seoul’s wishes; emigrate to a freer nation; or self-publish your works and await the consequences. South Korea and Taiwan don’t have flawless human rights records, but compared to Kim Il-Sung’s or Mao Zedong’s regimes, they were on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

Another hypothesis, one I’ve come across on r/manhwa posits that there’s a mix of western exoticism and self-loathing within the community due to an influx of manhwa set in medieval European-adjacent royalty, which speaks to a wider conception of the culture. It’s a stereotype that East Asia is unforgiving on its own people and if Japanese Isekai is any indicator, then the blend of escapism and exotic fantasy is more widespread than you might’ve previously believed. Don’t we all want to travel to an alien world and jive with the locals?

The premise of this series.

The last hypothesis would probably come with the reputation of some western manhwa publishers and localizers. If you follow Rev Says Desu and Hiro Hei, you may have been made aware of a select few English voice actors of anime shotgunning their kneecaps off on social media while their Japanese counterparts either keep quiet or promote what they like (see: Aoi Yuki for more details). In a similar vein, a subsect of activist-minded artists have discovered the publisher Webtoon and are said to have been aggressively pushing their works on the platform, negatively impacting the reputation of the site and driving more innocuous publishers away and onto sites with different criteria for vetting and publishing comics. I’ve heard these arguments as well as the purported reputation of another web-series and I can’t say for sure which is the true culprit, but there’s a lot of power behind a perception. I’m pretty sure Toomics and Lezhin comics don’t have that much dirt under their heals though…

Whatever the case, on a scale of All the Luck to There Ain’t S[burp]t to Gamble With, Korean manhwa is closer to the latter with even Chinese manhua getting adaptations from time to time, though not nearly as much as Japanese animanga. Normally, I champion underground series, but this is a rare moment where I’d rather see more variety in this hardly tapped market. Even if you’re not in the market for sexual content, there’s a handful of series I can recommend off the bat that hardly ever touch that or even encourage the reader for touching themselves.

My top 3 would be these:

  1. Devilish Romance: a powerful demon is reincarnated as a Korean investigator and initially attempts to reclaim his honor as the most feared demon in the underworld, but is paired with a strict, if goofy prosecutor.
  2. Annoying Alice: Office romance between a pair of pure coworkers who like to mess with each other which gradually evolves into tender, loving romance.
  3. High School Devil: local delinquent is implored to change schools and start anew but his reputation as a brawler gets him into trouble not 5 minutes into admission to the school.

As a bonus, a dystopian manhwa by the name of Shaman centering on a special forces agent tasked with safeguarding a K-pop idol duo.

Also, circling back to the porn part of my manhwa arc, it was where I first discovered that the black bars were cast out in favor of the lightsaber in pornhwa and hentai. Whichever came first (no pun intended), I’d like to believe there’s an influence, if not a cross-cultural pollination.