Yijun hates school. His teachers don’t like him and neither do his classmates. Worst of all, whenever he feels especially bad, black sludge erupts from his body. Nobody else can see it. They can’t see the white sprites in the corner of his eye, either, or the demon king. Yijun must climb the long steep hill to school alone, forever. But one day for a group project he’s paired with a fellow weirdo named Suni. She says that she can see the black sludge, too. Can Suni pull Yijun out of his deep despair? Will Yijun recognize that Suni has problems of her own?
Taste of Illness was drawn in 2018 by Ilkwon Ha, one of WEBTOON’s most idiosyncratic storytellers. His previous works include military science fiction (Duty After School), comedy (God of Bath) and even sex farce (Sperman.) I’ll always remember him for Annarasumanara, a 2010 coming of age drama with a loud and experimental digital aesthetic. (It was adapted in 2022 into the K-Drama The Sound of Magic.) Ha drew webcomics at a time when there wasn’t yet a formula for success. Whatever technical skill he lacked as an artist, he made up for by making intentional artistic choices and sticking to them.
Teenage wasteland
Annarasumanara is the mirror image of Taste of Illness. Both are magical realist coming of age tales about a young woman/man coming into her/his own via a relationship with another man/woman. Yet the effect of each could not be any more different. The heart of Annarasumanara is the contrast between banal reality and a pink and purple wonderland of ferris wheels and carousels. Taste of Illness by comparison is strictly black and white. It portrays adolescence and coming adulthood not as fantasy but as desolation.
How much you get out of Taste of Illness depends on whether or not you can stand the protagonist. Yijun is an antisocial jerk. He blames his peers for not wanting to spend time with him. When his teacher matches him with Suni for a school project, he blames Suni. Eventually he comes around on her, because he’s a heterosexual teenage boy desperate for human contact. But even then he only ever sees her life through his own frame of reference. Not until the very end does he realize that Suni has her own point of view.
Climbing the hill
It can be tough to sit with Yijun in that headspace, even for a short 27 episodes. What kept me reading is how much Ha’s use of magical realist metaphors reminded me of my own teenage experiences with anxiety. For instance, in the climax of the first episode, Yijun’s head erupts into black goo. It’s a visceral image that is shocking by itself. But what makes it that much worse for Yijun is that even though nobody else in his classroom can see the goo, they all recognize the pain that he is feeling and judge him for it.
Another great example: the absurdly large hill leading to Yijun’s school. Every day Yijun laments just how difficult it is to walk up and down that hill by himself. As his mental health degrades and the sludge consumes his life, the hill becomes that much more unbearable. How could anybody hope to climb that thing when just leaving your bedroom already requires so much effort? If only you could defeat your depression as simply as you might confront the demon king with your hero’s sword. Yet the hill, not the demon king, is at the heart of Taste of Illness. This is a story that prizes the hard work of routine over easy catharsis.
Black and white
Taste of Illness iterates into the cinematic approach of Ha’s earlier series Duty After School. That comic utilized name cards, camera effects and limited coloring to make the reader feel as if they were watching a live action documentary. Taste of Illness strips away the artifice but leans into luxurious framing. The angle and depth of every panel “shot” is purposeful. You can see that Ha has eight years of additional experience since drawing Annarasumanara.
Speaking of hard work, this is a comic with proper backgrounds. The majority of Korean webcomics that are produced these days utilize 3D assets to create their environments. I can understand why artists and studios might choose to rely on these assets, or forgo backgrounds entirely, rather than waste their limited time and resources on original backgrounds. At the same time, I can’t help but be frustrated at how every school, office building and hospital in a modern Korean webcomic looks exactly the same.
Taste of Illness by comparison has backgrounds featuring straight line shading and wobbly architecture. Every apartment building, locker and stool looks as if it was run through Yijun’s distorted teenage brain before materializing in reality. It adds immeasurably to the effect that the story you are reading takes place in a specific location and headspace rather than on a reusable television set.
A mainstream industry
There’s a Deadline interview with Kang Full, an early master of Korean online comics. In it he says that “there was a time when webtoons were transforming the industry – but now they’re a part of the mainstream industry…we used to see a lot more experimentation with webtoons.” One look at popular offerings available on WEBTOON, Tapas or Manta would be enough to convince anybody of his thesis. Even when a script distinguishes itself, its accompanying art is nearly always interchangeable.
That’s not to say that there aren’t great Korean webcomics being made today. There are many of them, including some that push the boundaries even further than what Illkwon Ha was up to in 2010. Still, today’s WEBTOON artists have come up under a very different paradigm, where the medium has a particular look to work for or against. The sky is no longer the limit.
Kaboom!
My favorite aspect of Taste of Illness is that it does not chase trends. That does not mean that it is original; “angry teenage boy overcomes depression with the help of a girl” is a tale as old as time. But this well-worn story is presented with such confidence that you can’t help but think this is exactly the story that the artist wanted to tell, presented in the format that they wanted to tell it, whether or not anybody else requested it.
That quality feels particularly retro considering that the comic came out in 2018, the year in which international webcomic hits like Solo Leveling and True Beauty blew the roof off the medium. Those comics were destined from the start for the media mix machine. Taste of Illness by comparison speaks for itself. It should remind us, as Kakao and Naver push for market dominance via exploiting their intellectual property, that what really matters is the idiosyncrasies of the artists who made that IP to begin with.
