By Giacomo Lee, UK author. Read more about fandom in the Far East with the Sherlock fan café, Doctor Who TARDIS theme pub & lovely Ms Karen Gillan in webtoon form over at his official site NOW..!



Love motels and cafes of the book or comic book variety are probably the only places where you’ll see South Koreans holding actual paper comics in their hands. Even then, these comics are not what’s currently in vogue in Korea, and more often than not they are simply Korean translations of long-running Japanese series like One Piece.




To find the latest and best manwha - or 만화 - you’ll have to peek over someone’s shoulder and see what’s on their smartphone, for most if not all Korean comics reside on the internet in the form of so-called ‘webtoons’ , as laid out for free on a html page or web app, instead of the priced downloads offered by, say, Comixology.

After a little peeking on the Seoul subway, my eyes were drawn to the bizarre yet beautiful 평범한 8반, aka Normal Class No. 8, as written and drawn by Parker Young. This new series on webcomic portal Naver is told through the eyes of an average Korean school student, who alas was born with a not so average-sized head. It’s a huge noggin actually, for reasons left unclear to the reader, and his predicament is laid out below in 4 strips that showcase Young’s eye-catching style.




The situation is obviously a bad one, until one day when the boy’s transferred to a new homeroom at school, one made entirely of fellow ‘freaks.’ Again, the how of these kids came to be isn’t important. This isn’t X-Men, and these wayward youths are certainly no superheroes. Instead, Young is more concerned with how these kids bond in class and engage with the outside world together as a group. Friendships are made, and crushes are formed e.g. on a girl born with a cheetah’s tail (who, with her big chest and small face, is admittedly drawn to the usual standards of beauty in what’s a rather disappointing move by the creator, especially when considering the cartoon’s overall message of diversity!)


Normal Class No. 8 is also smart in how it shows that these freakish kids can only really be taught by similarly ‘freakish’ teachers. For example, Vincent Van Gogh leads the art class, reminding the reader of why the kids’ physical differences are rarely discussed in the strip itself. One just needs to think how often we discuss our own differences in day-to-day life, the ones within that lay invisible to the naked eye, much like the problems that dogged Van Gogh throughout his troubled life, no doubt.



Perhaps in a society like South Korea’s, not fitting in can indeed be viewed as freakish as an over-sized head, or having as rubbery a body as DC Comic’s Plastic Man. Such freaky outcasts would naturally bond together, and where else can one find someone as weird as they are except in the big melting-pot of the school playground?

Talking of Korea, the comic stays grounded with little details that will be familiar to the teaching majority of Korea’s ex-pat population e.g. the ubiquitous Samsung PC and almost uniform plastic slippers, as shown below:


One American company published a physical & digital comic anthology named Komacon in 2013, which was a great-looking collection of mythical tales and skits by current Korean artists. I’d argue though that the humdrum yet odd nature of Normal Class No. 8 is a far better representation of the askew tradition of contemporary Korean manga. If you’re curious to read more about the strip, you can peruse its fan cafe, or follow the creator’s blog & Facebook.




Giacomo Lee is a London author whose writing has been featured on Boing Boing & Doctor Who TV. Read the dark side to fake funerals and near-future Asia in Lee’s new novel Funereal, out now on Amazon & iTunes through Signal 8 Press.