A Bona Fide Killer
Writer: YOON
Artist: GUM
Translator: U6IMFINE
Typesetter: Jung Seung A
Linguist: Matt Vitone
Designer: Hyeonsu Gu
Head Linguist: Dayna Moon
Head Designer: Juyeon Kang
Platform: Tapas
Yu Bona lives an ordinary life. After having a child with her husband Taesung, she returns from maternity leave to her job as the director of Sales Team 3 at Durumi Electronics. Her daily schedule is split between work, caring for her kid, and keeping peace with Taesung’s extended family.
But not everything is as it seems: Durumi Electronics is a front for a contract-killing company, and Bona is their legendary assassin Kingfisher. Worse, Taesung is a journalist whose misadventures risk exposing Bona’s secret. It’s up to Bona to keep her public and private life separate–at all costs…
Reading that synopsis, I had a certain idea of what A Bona Fide Killer would be about. Perhaps a story about a morally ambiguous antihero, whose love for her child contrasts with her cold-blooded disregard for other people. Or a thriller narrative in which Bona’s secret is constantly on the verge of unraveling. That’s not what I got. A Bona Fide Killer (a collaboration between writer YOON and artist GUM) is, in fact, a cozy workplace sitcom about a team of murderous eccentrics and their interpersonal relationships.
Commence client meeting
The trick with Sales Team 3 is that it only pursues the scum of the earth. Child molesters, rapists, murderers and other certified villains. As a result, while Bona and her employees are all capable of violence, they are rarely put into a situation that challenges their morality or the reader’s attachment. The police might insist that Kingfisher is a criminal acting outside the law. But the reader knows better.
Part of me couldn’t help but wonder if this was a missed opportunity. For instance, one of Bona’s coworkers is a former torturer. Another lost her father to Kingfisher as a child. A different take on this story might ask what kind of psychology drives people who torture for the state, or whether Bona’s work has hurt the lives of ordinary people. But A Bona Fide Killer isn’t particularly interested in these questions. Sales Team 3 only tortures people that deserve it. Also, Bona actually saved her future coworker by killing her abusive father. The author YOON ensures that her actions are always justified.
Coming to terms
This ties into a larger concern I’ve had about Korean comics published via platforms like WEBTOON and Tapas, which is their willingness to separate characters into “good” and “bad” camps. You are always expected to root for the heroes and despise the villains. It is rarer to find a series that respects the needs and psychology of both its heroes and villains, or one that lacks such a divide. Over time I think this approach dilutes our understanding of human nature as readers. All it does is pander to our desire to read stories that make us feel good about ourselves without ever making us uncomfortable.
The fifty-five episodes of A Bona Fide Killer I read for this review are very much in this mold. You must take for granted that Kingfisher’s extralegal actions as the ace of an unaccountable superhero squad are a good thing. The meat of the story is in the characters and their relationships rather than questioning the premise or human nature. If you’re willing to accept this, as I did, you’ll find a series that deserved its spot in the 2024 World Webtoon Awards.
Bona fides
Bona is a charismatic character in the tradition of Kazuo Koike, the comics writer who taught his students that characters were everything. She’s a strong and smart killing machine who is unstoppable on the field. Her opponents underestimate her at their peril. One of the pleasures of the series is watching Bona’s adversaries realize again and again just how terrifying she is. The handful that do not fear her instead idolize her as an industry professional.
At the same time, though, there’s a hole at Bona’s center. She has no parents or relatives outside of her husband Taesung’s family. It is hinted that she did not have a happy childhood. Bona is so unschooled in traditional social scripts that she can’t recognize when (for instance) her mother-in-law is bullying her. The only thing that allows a god of death like Bona to relate to ordinary people is her love for Taesung and their child. It sounds like a small thing. But it made such a great impact on her life that the Bona before Taesung is unrecognizable from the Bona afterwards.
Found family
A Bona Fide Killer gradually expands from Bona’s immediate circle to a network of side characters. Sales Team 3 employees Oh Hyunnam (poisoner) and Gi Youngdo (hacker) both have crushes on Bona. Taesung’s younger sister Kwon Seah, who often helps Bona out with her child, wants to go out with Gi Youngdo–but her childhood friend, the policeman Bum Sunghoon, is convinced she has a crush on him. Meanwhile, Taesung’s mentee Goo Haena must fend off the advances of their annoying coworker Go Jison.
While these characters are not necessarily complex, they can certainly hold their own even when Bona is elsewhere. Seah’s romantic misadventures introduce a youthful love triangle to the series. The journalists and the police have their own parallel narratives. We even see Haena, a relatively minor character, go out drinking with her friends. This is all crucial to build a world outside Bona. It also helps explain why that world matters so much to Bona that she changed herself to become a part of it.
When the mother-in-law does not agree
In this regard, Taesung’s extended family is my favorite part of the series. An early storyline puts them in conflict with each other. Bona is expected to help Taesung’s mother prepare a meal to sacrifice for the family’s ancestors. Unfortunately, she lacks experience and has no idea what her responsibilities are. When Taesung steps in to help carry the load, his mom flies into a rage. It is a woman’s responsibility, she says, to do the cooking. How could Bora let her husband wear an apron and still be a proper wife?
Another comic might make Taesung’s mom the villain here. But A Bona Fide Killer takes a more nuanced approach. Certainly, Taesung’s younger sister Seah thinks that sacrificing food is an out-of-date tradition. But his older sister sides with their mother, in part because she too has done it for her whole life. Meanwhile, Taesung rejects the tradition not because he disapproves, but because he hates that his relatives are making Bona feel small. In the end, it’s up to Bona to maintain peace between relatives that she loves but can’t fully understand.
Taking the plunge
Just like the story, GUM’s art grew on me the more I read A Bona Fide Killer. At first I wasn’t overly impressed. The last series I reviewed, after all, was Guardians of the Lamb, which had some of the most imaginative visuals I’ve ever seen in a webcomic.
GUM’s style by comparison is very plain. Certainly, their character designs are soft, cute and distinct from each other in height and body shape. But the backgrounds, when they exist at all, are built out of generic CG models common to the world of webtoons. The colors are muted and frequently beige. Most annoying of all, A Bona Fide Killer is constantly explaining itself via text boxes rather than letting the art carry the story.
When YOON gets out of their way, though, GUM can be a very competent comics artist. They’re particularly good at using the vertical scroll to tell jokes. There’s a fantastic gag at the start where Seah is so overwhelmed by Youngdo’s good looks that she drops her laptop. The reader scrolls from the top of the panel, with Seah’s love-struck face, to the bottom, where Bona plunges to grab the laptop before it hits the ground. The potential energy contained between these two beats alone convinced me that I had underrated GUM.
Scenes from a marriage
Many vertical scroll comics, even the ones with good art, are organized more like a stack of discrete pictures than a sequential narrative. Occasionally GUM falls into that trap. Often, though, their episode layouts show real thought. I was particularly struck by one sequence where GUM slices the space between Bona and her husband to foreshadow a coming divide. It’s a visual parallel to how Taesung’s mother’s own relationship with her partner is framed earlier in that episode. Yet it’s not a particularly flashy moment; GUM lets the reader put the pieces together themselves.
A Bona Fide Killer is a breezy read on the surface. Look closer, though, and it’s clear that GUM (as well as the writer, YOON) are doing a deceptively large amount of work. When the first season’s cliffhanger ending paid off a one-off joke from nearly thirty chapters ago, I knew I was in good hands. This is a bona fide charmer.
