A Compendium of Ghosts
Writer/Artist: Lee Yul
Platform: Lezhin
Lezhin is best known for its portfolio of titles for mature readers. A Compendium of Ghosts, though, is something else: the tale of Seijin the shaman’s daughter as she navigates supernatural happenings in a small Korean village. If you’re a fan of “supernatural investigation” stories like Mushishi or Mononoke, you’ll be right at home here.
Lee Yul’s character designs aren’t tall and stylish like in most webtoons. Instead they’re simple and squat, with round faces and pointy noses. They inhabit a world of muted colors, sepia browns and faded blues, as filtered through perpetual afternoon and evening light. It creates an atmosphere of antiquity removed from historical time. The perfect place for fairy tales.
A Compendium of Ghosts is not necessarily the goriest or most surprising horror webcomic. This isn’t Sweet Home or Bongcheon-Dong Ghost. Yet Lee Yul is very good at capturing what makes spirits, as opposed to physical threats, so uniquely scary. A ghost can be watching you from anywhere. It can follow you anywhere. The space between a person and a ghost, and the speed at which it closes, is the perfect fit for the medium of a vertical comic.
In the first storyline, Seijin’s peer Sang is pursued by a spirit. First we see a single black dog’s paw, out of place and unexplained. Then invisible hands and feet, one after the other, leaving imprints in the dirt and stains on wooden floors. Lee Yul expertly utilizes the white gutter to control the pace of these reveals until the spirit is right there behind Sang. Black space is also used to suggest endless depths stretching into the recesses of your phone or computer.
There’s an excellent moment later where Sang passes Seijin an ornament he found in the forest. To his eyes it’s a simple construction of white beads and fur. Seijin, though, sees it for what it really is: a tooth. The revelation is stretched out just enough so that the reader feels the hole opening under their feet, and then climaxes with a crash and the appearance of the spirit. I’d happily compare this scene to Emily Carroll’s work, and since I consider Carroll one of my favorite horror cartoonists, that’s no small praise.
A Compendium of Ghosts isn’t just about scares, though. The first story ends with the reveal that the spirit is not just a monster, but a victim: a man killed in the wilderness by rogues en route to delivering a gift to his disapproving mother. Just like that, the genre shifts from creeping horror to tragedy and catharsis. Everything that came before is recontextualized. It’s a simple trick that many other “supernatural investigation” comics have used before. A Compendium of Ghosts, though, does it particularly well. The sentiment and character work broadens the comic’s palette without diluting the creep factor.
I can’t imagine why the English release of A Compendium of Ghosts is so obscure, except that it’s a Lezhin comic rather than one published on a more popular platform like WEBTOON or Tapas. It won the Grand Prize from the Korea Creative Content Agency in 2013, and even inspired a video game adaptation. I’d highly recommend it to anybody looking for a great episodic comic series with broad appeal.
