• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.36
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• pp.417-436
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• 2014

Stories have existed with the history of mankind along with drawings. Any genre of art that discusses the flow of time, such as literature, film, and play, cannot be free from narratives. The comics are not an exception. The comics tell the narratives with drawings from the cartoons in single blocks to the full-length series in tens of volumes. Nevertheless, there are not many studies that discuss the narratives in the comics. They may have been overlooked because they have been studied in the field of literature. However, I am envious of the field of film, which unravels the narratives with the same visual images, profoundly explores its own narratives and experimentally modifies and expands them into various levels. Therefore, I would like to make a narrative approach to the comics in this study. This study will discuss the non-narratives. It may sound ironic that the study of narratives will discuss the non-narratives, but the narratives cannot exist without the non-narratives. The non-narratives in the narratives compose the narratives in various ways. Therefore, Chapter II will discuss how the theory of narratives in literature classifies the narratives and the non-narratives as a theoretical background. Then, Chapter III will analyze the forms of non-narratives in Han Jo Kim's "The Texture of Memory" to discuss how the non-narratives of comics are composed, while Chapter IV will summarize the preceding studies. Finally, the narratives should be actively studied as it is an essential component of comics. I hope that this study can lay the foundation for more in-depth discussions of the narratives in the comics.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.53-98
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• 2021

This paper examines the ways in which Hollywood feature films produced and widely circulated with the establishment of the studio system was consumed in the ethnically segregated Korean movie theaters in Kyǒngsǒng in the 1920s. Focusing on how those theaters appropriated what Hollywood represented, this paper has three objectives. First, from a historical and economic perspective, I will historicize the emergence of so-called prestige pictures and how movies became a branded product in that process. Second, I will also loot at how Chosǒn Theater, one of the earliest movie theaters in the Korean-resident area in Kyǒngsǒng who sought to be a prestigious movie palace actively exploited Hollywood brand, by foregrounding its Paramount connection, in particular. Lastly, through a close reading of weekly programmes and handbills, I will examine how these promotional print materials, as an intermediating medium, helped to supplement the audiences' viewing of Hollywood movies while creating loyal audiences.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.157-190
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• 2020

How is the "Yonsei University Incident" of August 1996 remembered from a periphery perspective and a gender perspective? With this question in mind, I reviewed the history of the revolution and the missing memories in the period from 1996 to 2016 in Korean literature. I tried to recover the story of the revolution experienced and remembered by those who were politically invisible or gender-excluded, by centering on novels with strange reminiscences of the student movement in 1996, namely Yoon I-Hyung's "Big Wolf Blue" ("Big Wolf Blue", 2011), Choi Eun-Young's "Responsibility"(2018), Hwang Jung-Eun's Didi's Umbrella (2019) and Park Sang- Young's "A piece of Rockfish Sashimi The Taste of the Universe"(How to Love in Metropolis, 2019). There is a correlation between the perception of the periphery and the name of the "unrememberable" revolution. And this fact tells us that revolution does not mean the same thing to everyone, even when it "passes" through the midst of a revolution that shares the imagination of a better society and the desire to reorganize the system. In other words, it emphasizes that the logic of exclusion and hierarchy was still in operation even at the moment of revolution. It would be said that this review is not only a rethinking of the student movement, but also a reevaluation from the gender perspective of Korean society in the 1990s.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.13-51
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• 2021

As a case study, this paper historicizes the film culture in Namchon district in Keijo(京城) based on a preliminary research on the film ephemera produced during the colonial period. Through cross-examining articles appeared in Japanese newspapers and magazines at the time, this paper empirically reconstructs the Japanese settlers' film culture in Keijo, a colonial city whose cultural environment was ethnically divided into 'Bukchon' and 'Namchon.' During the silent era, movie theaters in the Namchon district not only played a role of cinema chain through which films imported and distributed by Japanese film companies were circulated and exhibited but also served as a cultural community for Japanese settlers who migrated to a colony. The film ephemera issued by each theater not only provided information about the movie program, but also connected these Japaneses settlers in colonial city, Keijo to the homogeneous space and time in Japan proper. Both as a minority and colonizer in a colony, these Japanese settlers experienced a sense of 'unity' that could 'distinguish' their ethnic identity differentiated from Koreans through watching movies in this ethnically segregated cultural environment. In doing so, they were also able to connect themselves to their homeland in Japan Proper, despite on a cultural level. This is a cultural practice that strengthens a kind of long distance nationalism. Examining Japanese film culture through film ephemera would not only contribute to the previous scholarship on modern theater culture and spectatorship established since the 2000s, but also be a meaningful attempt to find ways and directions for film history research through non-film materials.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.13-44
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• 2021

This article describes the fear of infection through the Covid19 pandemic and the rapid phase change of human species with H. P. Lovecraft's fiction and "Project LC. RC". Pandemic and climate change, which can be called global weirding, fundamentally question the status and history of human species in the ecosystem. The horror creature and cosmological indifferentism in Lovecraft's weird fiction are contemporary in that they help shed light on today's global weirding. But Lovecraft's racism allows him to ask more fundamental questions about the logjam of his cosmic horror. "Project LC. RC" are a Korean writers's works of cultural variation that rewrites controversial racism and misogyny in Lovecraft's fiction. Such variation becomes the task of creating a mutation in Lovecraft as it becomes infected with the affection of Lovecraft's writing. This article first noted the creative power of Lovecraft's fiction that induces such a mutation. And under this premise, this article wanted to reveal the meaning of Lee Seo young, Eun rim, and Kim Bo young's recreates of Lovecraft's fiction through the analysis of images and motifs of abject, plant creature and symbiosis. Specifically, Lovecraft's creature, which evokes phallic fear, turns into an image of an abject embracing and comforting women's despair("I Want You to Stay Low"), a plant creature that provides women with refuge("Color in the Well"), and a creature of care and symbiotic life("A Sea of Plague"). This recreate/rewriting has contemporary significance in that it embodies values such as labor, care, and solidarity in their works. The conclusion noted another power of creative variation in Lovecraft's fiction, which is not reduced to recreate/rewriting.