HWAJA

It surprises me why an author like Hongjacga hasn't had anime or movies adapted.

Hongjacga does not write masterpieces, but stories that have simple starting points, but the quality of the drawing and story lives on its own. I like to define this artist as a landscape painter. Nothing innovative, but memorable.

Hwaja is a punch in the stomach as tells the truth of South Korea during the developing years. A backward place, full of problems and poverty. Today the axis has shifted, but like post-war Japan, South Korea in the 1980s lived on a fragile balance between capitalism, and dictatorships, and many people died of hunger. As a paradox, the North was in better shape.

The story begins in the summer of 1988, just before the Seoul Olympics, with the government trying to educate "the peasant population" on how to behave. We are immediately caught by the adventures of Ryu and Jay, two nine-year-old boys who meet in an abandoned house an uninhibited (maybe 11 or 12 years old) girl named Hwaja, who smokes and offers "sexual entertainment" if you bring her something to eat.

Scared to a hell of what they thought was a ghost child, the two fantasize about what mysteries lurk behind this red-eyed figure who lives in a haunted house where it seems many children in the past were martyred.

It is from this point onward that the panels degrade in colour, showing a story that takes place over a span of 30 years we see how the colour darkens to show us the rot that hides behind a small town where the population "knows", but does not "do". It is not shown to us but the way the story is told lets us imagine as readers the atrocities committed in that haunted house, of the drool by disgusting and deigned old men who touched the body of this little girl, or rape towards many children, and the colour becomes darker, almost rusty, the faces distorted and rotten.

Hwaja doesn't give in, she remains solid in her emotions, she almost looks like a soulless body accepting her destiny.

What is striking is the serenity of her being and even the events are shown to us without great explanations or crying scenes typical of this narrative that tends to hyper-dramatize. Hwaja becomes a sexual object, a total possession, a drug from which there is no escape. An addiction that can hurt and lead you to madness but you can't do anything without it (or her in this case). It makes you suffer, but you want it.

And only in the end does the painting become clear again, as if the darkness of the city and in some respects the darkness of South Korea had vanished in that 2012 in which the world should have ceased.

Hongjacga does no wrong, a master at his craft.