by. Gyeongmin Lee
Webtoon is a rising culture industry in Korea. When webtoon was first launched five or six years ago, many Koreans considered webtoon as contents for cartoon manias. However, nowadays webtoon is popular not only to manias but also to normal Koreans. Many movies and dramas find materials or stories from webtoons and most of them are very successful. Therefore, I would like to introduce two infamous webtoons for EIE students.
Naver webtoon - Winter Woods
Sometimes, drawing itself can draw an attention. Webtoon Winter Woods has beautiful drawings which reminds the readers of the fairy tales. It mostly has a mood of water color and pastel color.
The basic story line is like a fable. It is a story about a human size puppet slowing becoming a human being. The puppet's name is Winter, and he begins to learn human emotions after he meets a woman named Jane.
However, the most attractive point about this webtoon is that although the drawings are like fairy tales, the overall mood is not entirely happy and bright. There are some aspects that triggers horror and bizarre mood such as an episode of the love between the blind and the murderer. Also the drawings may seem warm in some parts, but it has a mood of cold and chill. This webtoon perfectly stands in a good balance between the warm and cold mood and it makes readers to concentrate to the both fairy tale and ghost story like story line.
Naver webtoon - Welcom to the Room 305!
It may seem like a childish title. However, don't judge a book with its cover! In spite of its childish title, it is considered as a great work to many readers.
Welcome to the Room 305! is a webtoon about various sexual persuasions. There are episodes for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and even heterosexuals. The most attractive point of this webtoon is that it describes many difficulties that these sexual minorities go through. It doesn't excessively plead about the difficulties to the readers but it just calmly introduce thous hardship and it is more effective in that way.
There is another attractive point. Even though this webtoon contains a serious topic, it never loses a sense of humor. This aspect keeps reader from being too sad or hear broken. It also gives an energy to its own.
Why don't you try these webtoons in your free time? They are fun and meaningful and will show a new characteristic of webtoons.