• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.112-120
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• 2022

In order to examine the cultural vicious cycle of gender representation in online educational content, this paper reviewed the top five popular webtoons of inamootoon (EBStoon), Korea's first children's webtoon platform. The patterns of appearance representation that distinguish character's gender, the desire and psychology of characters according to gender, and their functions in the work were critically analyzed from a feminist perspective. In most of the works, the appearance of characters often follows gender stereotypes. It appears that women have long hair and wear dresses while men have short hair. On the other hand, the gender characteristics in terms of psychology and function show the aspect of breaking gender's cliche. The gender proportion of the protagonists is almost the same. Regardless of gender, they function as solvers or rescuers, bravely and wisely overcoming the problem situation. By the way, it is interesting that in representing the main character's gender, the weaker the gender stereotypes, the more popular the work among the readers. This fact suggests that the critical acceptance and choice of young readers can break the cultural vicious cycle of gender representation.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.32
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• pp.159-187
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to verify the status of current digital comics research trends and the characteristics in Korea. For this purpose, 87 articles and dissertations published between 19900 to 2012 were analysed by a meta-analysis methods. Digital comics platforms, topics, methods were examined to understand the landscape of the digital comics in Korean context. The main results of this study are as follow. First of all, the number of researches on the digital comics has been in the rise, and the various academic journals have published articles to understand the digital comics on the basis of their own academic background. Despite of the short history of digital comics researches, the range of research subjects has been broaden, and more integrated approaches have been taken from the various research fields. The content of articles, however, was skewed to a certain platform, topic and the method such as the website based comics, the text analysis, and the qualitative methodology. Thus, the more systematic and integrated approaches are needed to understand the digital comics issues and to build up the digital comics studies.