

Hellper, a manhwa about a man that dies and goes to hell, sounds like a very generic concept but is much deeper when you look below the surface.
The story follows Jang Gwangnam, a tribe leader that died after getting hit by a truck, after that he appears in hell, where before him appears a reaper, who tells him that there are two types of tickets, white ones meaning you go to heaven, and black ones, well, to hell. Jang promptly sucker punches, steals all of his stuff, and runs away. This is as much as I can say about the story before I get into spoilery territory, so I'll just move onto the other things about the manhwa, both good and bad.
I'll start off with what I think is the best part about it, which is the structure of the story, at the start, we follow only two sides of the story, Jang and his shenanigans in hell, and the world of the living, with the Killberos tribe trying to cope with the loss of their leader. However later on, the story branches off into 5 different other stories about completely different characters, and it does it perfectly, it makes you care for certain characters and makes you hate other ones, it makes you care about what's gonna happen to the characters, are they gonna die? Are they gonna live? Is everything going to turn out alright? Usually when mangas/manhwas hop around between many different stories at once it makes it all feel too cluttered and complicated, but I feel like Hellper does this exceptionally well, doing it often enough to make the side characters feel important, even the ones that appear for a single part of the story, while also not sticking to those sub-stories too long so the main story doesn't progress too slowly.
The artwork too, is just incredible, the artstyle is simple yet very expressionate, the action scenes really pack a punch, i mean for god's sake in certain panels the creator literally tells you to scroll really fast, how awesome is that? The colors as well are really important to both the art itself but to the story too, with hell being a dark, empty black and white landscape, with only different souls and reapers having any form of color on them, each color depicting their status, while the world of the living is filled with bright colors. Hellper's artstyle is a perfect mix of detailed and simple, being detailed enough so you know what is what, and simple enough for the movement to be extremely exaggerated.
The manhwa is really well written, being able to switch between comedy and serious moments on the fly and still fit the story/setting, every character is special and makes them feel like they really exist in the world, they're so well written that the main character isn't even really my favorite character because of how many cool side characters there are in the story.
Now, so far all I've been doing is singing praises, so what do I dislike? Well, there's not alot, in fact, there's only one thing.
(I guess this part could be considered a spoiler since it talks a tiny bit about the ending, but it doesn't tell you what happens during it, only my thoughts about it, so watch out if you care about that.)
However, even if there's no real ending so far, I would still really recommend this manhwa to everyone, it's genuinely one of the best things I've read, the only thing holding it back is the fact that it's not finished yet, but I do believe the story has alot of potential, and hopefully we won't need to wait long for said sequel to come.
29.5 out of 31 users liked this review