• Cartoon and Animation Studies
• /
• s.41
• /
• pp.553-578
• /
• 2015

The Korean society was forcefully merged with the invasion of Japan in 20th century, and traditional culture of Korea was damaged severely by colonization from Japan. After liberation, Korean society experienced drastic social change with Korean War, and industrial economy and democratic system developed as modernization and democratization occurred. However, Korean traditional culture dissolved more severely as Korean society developed industrial economy and democracy. As criticism of existing Western center of society and the emphasis of cultural identity of non-western regions and third-world, world society preferred exchange of culture of diverse nations and people with each other in advent of postmodernism thoughts in mid-late 20th century. If the cultural identity of Korea was dissolving meanwhile, it was needed to be recovered again. Despite the research in Korean history, language, art, architecture was performed to recover cultural identity of Korea, it did not go in-depth with Korean mythology, for Korean mythology is considered as superstition or savage. Mythology shows subconscious group psychology of people who live in certain specific region. Studying Korean mythology is one of the ways to rediscover cultural identity of Korea. In order for Korean mythology to be known to many people, its stories should be told by media. There were movies, plays, drama, and novels produced based on existing Korean mythology as introduction, then these mythical stories are appear in subculture contents such as recent comics, animation, webtoon, games, and light novels. Then population of game players and webtoon readers increased as dissemination of PC and smart phones, and increasing market scale of subculture contents increased a population of consumers of comics, animation, and light novel. Consumers of sub-culture contents were interested as many of these contents were created, base on Korean mythology. Therefore, this paper is written as research on Korean mythology and its signification in sub-cultural contents which were produced base on Korean mythology.