Cartoon is compound storytelling media where the drawings and texts exist together. Continuous drawings produce narrations and all linguistic and non-linguistic creating media which compose cartoons make various storytellings possible. And here, artis...
Cartoon is compound storytelling media where the drawings and texts exist together. Continuous drawings produce narrations and all linguistic and non-linguistic creating media which compose cartoons make various storytellings possible. And here, artistic values of cartoons and literary values of literatures are so important that overall values of cartoons can be characterized by them. Cartoons develop storytelling through moving from fresco to publishing and subsequently to web.
First cartoonist who realized literary values of cartoon’s storytelling is Kangfull. Kangfull is an author who has made his cartoons taking fully advantage of digital space which is called “web”. In his artworks, he created cinematic effects of cartoons and literary storytelling through scroll at the same time. Starting from Kangfull’s first long piece cartoon, 「Soonjungmanhwa」, long piece webtoon based on storytelling started to appear. In addition, direction of webtoon through scroll and influences of literary storytelling have been handed down to even current storytelling writers. He won Award of Excellence in <Korean Cartoon Grand Prize, 2004>, Grand Prize <Today’s Our Cartoons>, <Grand Prize of Cartoon Readers> and <BICOF Award of Cartoons>. That proves his works are the first cases which started to capture the acknowledgement of literary value of webtoon and its directing capability.
In his interviews and works postscripts, Kangfull emphasized several times that stories are more important than the drawings in cartoons. He said he has sought the completeness of storytelling as the way of compensating what he lacks at drawing skills. He plans his works so that his works can have completeness of storytelling with delivering clear messages with just one word. Kangfull is a cartoonist who completely plans storytelling before he starts writing long piece webtoon series. When all elements of story structures, scene dialogs are prepared, he starts writing cartoons and he only concentrates in drawing during working on them.
As a result, Kangfull’s webtoon has four strengths. First one is maximizing emotional sympathy using ordinary characters. Second one is expanding stories from various viewpoints using multiple narrators. Third one is giving literary values in the process of development of stories using symbolic props. Fourth one is showing the cinematic direction by omitting columns and using vertical scrolls. Additionally, he actively communicated with the readers through comments, mails and extra editions.
Thanks to these advantages of storytelling, all of Kangfull’s long piece cartoons were made as book and sold a lot and seven ones of ten works were made into films. In addition, episode 3 of 「Soonjungmanhwa」 series was made as a play and has been played until now. This is one of the examples that Kangfull’s webtoon showed the possibility of OSMU (One Source Multi Use). 「Soonjungmanhwa」 also was transformed into books, moving cartoons, films, plays and animations, which showed the possibility that long piece storytelling could succeed in webtoon.
「Soonjungmanhwa」 is Kangfull’s first long piece that has a big meaning in the process of development of webtoon as well as his typical work which represents the characteristics of all his works. To examine the characteristics of storytelling in 「Soonjungmanhwa」 can be a study to search for the representative characteristics of Kangfull’s webtoon. Additionally, if ‘special love stories which are made by ordinary people’ is transformed into another media of book, film and play, studying what storytelling is used in the production can be one of the ways to draw distinctive storytelling of webtoon.