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| THE KAIST TIMES http://kaisttimes.com | |||||||
Online cartoons are very popular these days. Since cartoonist Do-ha's "Great Catsby" and Kang-pool Na's "Timing" on the internet portal Daum ended, many students are saying, "There is no fun left in my college life."
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| Panel from "The Great Catsby". |
If you click on the ara bulletin, you can easily find student blogs to online cartoons, e.g. "I don't understand 'Training Suit' today," or " 'Trauma' today is extremely good." Some might not understand why students are so serious about cartoons. But once you realize that online cartoons are part of student culture, you can understand their reactions. For many, humorous online cartoons are a welcome respite from excessively busy lifestyles.
They are the cartoons internet portal sites such as Daum or Paran. Cartoons on sports newspapers should probably be categorized as online cartoons as well, since most students enjoy sports newspaper cartoons through the internet instead of newspapers.
Many online cartoons brighten our lives. They may be divided into 3 types.
This type is the front-runner. It was dominant in the early stages of online cartoon culture because of commercialized characters and book publications. A great strength of this type is that ordinary people can take part because they have only to upload material from their computers. Also because people can draw their day-to-day lives like a diary, cartoonists in this category get lots of sympathy from readers. "Marine Blues", "Snow Cat," and KAIST alumni drawn "Drunken Monkey" are the good examples of this type.
Short cartoons composed of 4 cells. The storyline is not that detailed, but it makes people laugh by means of a dramatic turnover in the end. Most online cartoons are in this category. "Trauma," "Training Suit" and "Watanka," are the good examples. Phil-hyun Ko, whose pen name is Mega Shocking, also cracks people up with delicate wordplay. Mega Shocking's strips like "Jesus, Shit Soup" and "3-Minute Greenhorn Soup" have been extremely popular - at the very top of the internet.
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| Drunken Monkey. |
A solid story is the biggest strength of a long cartoon. Many cartoonists now working online used to work offline, and story and structure differ little differ between the two. The most famous cartoon of this type is "The Myth of Paradise" written by Hyun-Sae Lee. The myth of paradise was first published offline about 10 years ago. It was indicted for obscenity once, but judged "not guilty". It is still serialized. Young-man Hus's "Parasite", Kang-pool and Do-Ha Kang's works also belong to this category.
First of all, people can access online cartoons easily. Just a few clicks, and we get a fun cartoon without ever going to a book store! On top of that, the quality of online cartoons is improving. It's hard to beat great masterpieces like Do-ha Kang's "Great Gatsby" or Young-soon Yang's "1001" even offline.
As online cartoons are less limited in length and deadline, cartoonists can express what is on their minds more freely. Also, cartoonists and readers can react instantly by blog, so the communication goes more smoothly. They can also share emotions directly. Perhaps for this reason, online cartoons seem much fresher than offline ones. The turn of events nobody can anticipate - love, separation, thought, hobbies - this is the stuff of online cartoons, the kinds of very personal topics that interest people greatly.
Also the strong colors of online cartoons grab attention from a visual generation hungry for bright images.
The offline cartoon market is currently inactive. Only 10 of the 30 cartoon magazines in published in the 90's survives. The 30% that survived mainly make use of Japanese cartoons. Since the offline cartoon market is dead, the online cartoon is the future of Korean cartooning. Finding capable cartoonists is essential to advancing the art form. Young cartoonist are poor at storyline, whereas middle aged cartoonist are poor at digital technology and color sense.
As Dae-young Song, the author of "Nangamtoon" revealed on the epilogue, cartoonists' biggest concern when they move from offline to online is coloring. If they overcome these difficulties through the online cartoon factory etc., they can make better cartoons and get more popularity. But cartoonists still have to keep deadlines, even though they are more flexible than offline deadlines, because they have promises to keep with readers.
Speaking of blogs, cartoonists prefer criticism with alternative suggestions to criticism that just trashes their work. That's the way cartoonists and readers can advance the quality of online cartoons together.
To satisfy my curiosity, I talked with Daum cartoon coordinator Won-Kim.
| THK: | When do you think online cartoons got serious? |
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| WK: | There is no precise starting period. But Seung-hyun Shim's "Papepopo" or Kang-pool's boy-meet-girl cartoons might roughly mark the beginning. |
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| THK: | What does the cartoon department do? And how carefully do you manage people's work? |
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| WK: | Our main tasks are cartoonist election, concept discussion, promotion and a little managing and updating. We don't touch the script at all because it belongs to the cartoonist. We just observe the cartoonist's style and provide some guidelines. The rest is up to the cartoonist. Basically, cartoonist selection is our main job. Editing belongs to the cartoonist as well. |
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| THK: | Then how do you select a cartoonist? |
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| WK: | Cartoonists phone us and send their work in most cases. Sometimes we do surfing to find a talented cartoonist and contact them. |
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| THK: | Sometimes we can find typos. How do you revise and edit them? |
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| WK: | Of course, there are typos. But the readers sometimes also have wrong information. Cartoonists often use slang to describe things freshly, and some readers think it's a grammatical mistake. Cartoonists usually check for typos themselves before editors check. But, as a practical matter, the checking is always imperfect because we are fighting deadlines. Please point out these mistakes to us. |
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| THK: | As you said, some of blogs are very vicious. How do you deal with them? |
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| WK: | Vicious blogs are a great annoyance for cartoonists. We don't touch any of them at all but treat them as spam. |
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| THK: | I wonder what happens if cartoonists miss a deadline. For example, I remember that Kang-pool's "Timing" and Do-Ha Kang's "Great Catsby" often missed thir deadlines in the later days. |
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| WK: | Both of them always completed the writing of a script before they started drawing. Maybe "could not meet the deadline" would be a more proper description than "did not meet the deadline." But if they miss a deadline, we are helpless. The only thing we can do is just keep reminding them of the deadline. There are lots of reasons for missing a deadline. There might be computer trouble. Cartoonists can get bogged down with more than one script. And so forth. |
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