The Institute for Korean Studies presents:
Surviving the Apocalypse in Co-Mix Form: Idiots, Spies, Monsters, and Zombies in South Korean Transmedia Storytelling
We Jung Yi
Vanderbilt University
Abstract: This talk on Korean comics (manhwa) consists of three parts. The first part focuses on a coming-of-age webtoon that refashions Cold War iconography in the digital universe to graphically narrativize young lives on the fringe of neoliberal society. Capitalizing on mobile technology, it comically portrays North Korean spies in the South in a way that resonates with millennials who feel like surplus losers in the day-to-day competition for success. The second part traces the transcultural origins of manhwa through the case of Mr. Fool (1924–27), a popular four-panel newspaper comic strip and the first comic adapted into a film in colonial Korea. The last part looks at the contemporary evolution of manhwa-based transmedia storytelling in the age of hallyu 4.0 and global streaming by discussing apocalyptic webtoons featuring zombies or monsters and their live-action Netflix adaptations.
We Jung Yi is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her first monograph, Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 2024), probes how the entanglement of colonial legacies, Cold War ideologies, and neoliberal economics defines contemporary in/human life, analyzing a broad spectrum of memory works, from influential novels of dissent against dictatorial rule to blockbuster films and webtoons in the era of the Korean Wave (hallyu). Yi is currently working on two intertwined book projects. One examines the Korean diaspora’s symbolic return through various media to their divided homeland with the aim of developing transregional frameworks for migration in the Asia-Pacific region. The other historicizes Koreanized genres of excess, from sinp’a theater and comic strips of the early colonial period to the TV melodramas and post-apocalyptic webtoons that have gained transnational currency with the rise of hallyu.