I understand that the word “mijeong” means “pure beauty” in Korean; at least, that’s what it says on the back of the NBM manhwa collection Mijeong. I’m not sure if the “pure” part necessarily applies to the work of Korean creator Byun Byung-Jun contained within, but I’m positive the “beauty” part does.
The seven stories of Byun’s that fill this book’s pages are each beautifully drawn, regardless of the subject matter, tone or even the style in which they’re drawn—all shift from story to story.
In fact, there’s such variety within these stories that it’s hard to see what it is that holds them together, beyond the creator, and perhaps the level of skill with which they’re illustrated. Most of them are set in the city, and share a certain romantic but bleak outlook, but then there’s a few near the end which are comedic pieces.
As a whole then, I’m not sure how successful a book Mijeong is, if one-person anthologies are to be judged on their cohesiveness, on the way that every part informs the entire work. But I certainly don’t want to sound dismissive of what Byun’s done here either, as there are some pretty great stories in here.
Perhaps the most different of them all is “202, Villa Sinil.” It’s the story of a sleepy-eyed young comics artist, also named Byun, who spends all day every day working on comics in his apartment, breaking only to eat, sleep and occasionally call the girl he loves, a girl who wants nothing to do with him. He slowly begins to realize what he does in his apartment somehow effects the outside world in dramatic, magical ways. For example, when he spills hot broth on a photograph of a comedian in the newspaper, the news reports the next day that she was horrible scalded. When he accidentally cuts a few politicians’ names in half with a cutting tool, he later learns they were both stabbed.
Does he have power to maim and kill, or is he just going crazy? This is as delicately illustrated as the rest of the stories, in a highly realistic style that is only slightly relaxed in the drawing of the characters, who tend to resemble the designs of other manhwa designs (at least among the younger characters). It is also full of darker colors, and drawn with more black, and the cartoonist lead is among the silliest of the characters in the book.
The other fairly straight comic piece is “Courage, Grandpa,” which involves a love triangle, in which one side is a house cat in love with a teacher who, obviously, isn’t aware of its feelings for her.
Furthest divorced from these visually is “Song For You,” a light, airy full-color piece, the only color piece in the book, in which a song brings two could-have-been-lovers together in an unusual way, and they share an unhappy fate.
The other stories are all drawn in black and white, with various levels of detail. There’s a story of a guardian angel, of a teenage girl and an old name who share an unusual relationship, a morbid black comedy involving school kids trying to dispose of a suicide victim’s body, and a story of one character telling another a story over the phone, rendered in a style so representational as to lean toward pen and ink photorealism.
Taken all together, they don’t reach that transcendent quality alluded to by the title, which is actually taken from the name of one of the characters anyway, and thus probably wasn’t meant to be a promise, but transcendent or not, beauty is always welcome, and there’s a lot of it between these covers.
