웹툰이 혐오의 시대를 건너는 방법 - 김숭늉의 ‘재난 3부작’을 중심으로 -

Abstract

This study aims to examine the methods by which webtoons embody disaster today, centering on the “Disaster Trilogy” by Kim Sung-nyung, which gave shape to the issue dubbed “global disaster.” Kim Sung-nyung's webtoons all exclude any description of the cause of disaster, instead dramatizing the situation in which hatred and intolerance based on class, gender and perceived weakness is routinized and aggravated due to disaster. Also, it gains an insight into how male subjectivity, ruled out from the mainstream, is transformed following the disaster. In his early work, Kim Sung-nyung mixed myths and fables, such as the mythical imagination based on the Bible and the figure of a dictator who enjoys the Korean modern and contemporary history. In his later work, Kim gives a sense of reality to a text through borrowing more positively a human, an event and media in “this place.” In a situation with the routinized disaster, an alternative that Kim suggests is solidarity based on empathy and guilt. When this is feasible, solidarity is formed beyond gender, age and class. Considering when the work was published, the impotent feeling in young people has gotten even worse after the mid-2010s, but in his later work Kim is pursuing a situation that will break through reality together, rather than concentrating on disillusionment. The solidarity based on compassion and common guilt will be capable of becoming ethics of proceeding with living in the era when disaster is institutionalized. In this regard, Kim's disaster webtoon requires attention as a text available for seeing imagination that may surpass hatred in this period.