ART

YOUR LIFE IS INCOMPLETE

The webcomic that shook South Korea

By Gunner Shin

It's hard to fail

In 2012, Yoon Tae-ho’s webcomic, Incomplete Life premiered in South Korea. The comic distinguished itself from other comics and South Korean stories with the way its characters constantly failed, again and again. South Korean culture is not particularly cool with failure. So Incomplete Life hit like a bombshell and gained nationwide attention. Every Tuesday morning more and more people would scroll down the screen to feel something new, something that the general culture wasn’t allowing them, a nice little taste of failure.

Yoon based Incomplete Life on the world’s oldest board game, GO, which is a little bit like chess, but more complex. GO started out as a game for Chinese tribal warlords to map out strategic advantages against their opponents. Yoon was interested in GO because there is only one goal — defeating your enemy. It’s a good metaphor for South Korean society, where we tend to treat business as a competition and a battlefield. Success, or the lack of it, is all about winners and losers. And South Koreans definitely do not want to be the losers. Needless to say, there’s a great deal of societal and cultural pressure to succeed.

Life is one big Go board

Viewing South Korea as one big GO board got people’s attention. Unlike chess, GO pieces are unranked (there’s no Queen or pawn, etc.), but simply black and white stones. You win by forming as many territories as possible. Either the black stones or the white stones take over and everyone is either a King or, maybe better put, everyone is a pawn in a much bigger game.

By comparing contemporary day jobs to GO, Yoon made it impossible to miss: life in Korea is the equivalent of war and everyone is a pawn in the bigger game of mainstream Capitalism. The characters are employees working for a trading company called One International. Through their duties, they learn to adapt and survive the unfair, impractical, and pressure-ridden worlds of Korean business.

Park

One of the most striking scenes in Incomplete Life happens when one of the main characters, Park, grows white wings. It represents a moment of bravery for a weak-hearted character. Below is the that begins  Park’s progression from everyman to avenger. The situation is an interesting one and typical of South Korean business. Park overhears a conversation where he is not only ridiculed for being a soft person, but also and more importantly a pawn to take the blame for the company’s economic shortfalls. He takes the bold step of arranging a meeting with his superiors to discuss what really is going wrong. It is his first attempt at speaking up for himself.

He grows wings

Park’s attempt appears to be successful. His white wings are on full display in the conference room. We revel in his moment of victory. However, as he thinks about the progression of events, he starts to see his own mistakes and the role he has played in this particular problem. He realizes his wings are only for hiding his own problems. He decides to let go of his wings and admit that he has failed. At that moment Park becomes naked, his wings scattered all over the floor. It’s a beautiful image, a depiction of what it’s like to see yourself for who you truly are.

And yet, Incomplete Life takes this basic idea and makes it even more complex. Park is not penalized for failing. His superiors focus on a new plan that will work this time and make Park write a report reviewing the problems. Park’s honesty turns out to be an effective strategy to counter his opponents, though this would not be a typical move you would make in GO. What’s striking, though, and what resonates with South Korean readers is how Park isn’t obsessed with winning. Instead, he seems more concerned with how the present battle can evolve into the next one. The game becomes about integrity and embracing the moment.

Sun

Everyone is so tired

There are many scenes in Incomplete Life of the emotion and problems of everyday life. The character Sun is a perfect example. She is married, the head deputy of her department, and a mother of a 5-year old daughter, Somi. Sun has a sharp personality and is known for her tough management style. Under her supervision and superior tactics, using the metaphor of GO so central to Incomplete Life, the stones are always advancing on her battlefield.

The problem is she is too busy pushing single pieces, like a chess match, instead of conquering the entire board as you aim to do in GO. She sees her work strategy as rock solid, but develops tunnel vision for an endgame that does not exist. She never accounts for what family life and being a mother will do to her plans.

One day, Sun finds a drawing of her and her husband in her daughter Somi’s bag. The drawing depicts a man lying on a couch facing the wall and a woman wearing a pink dress but without a face. The little girl can only remember her parents’ backs and not their faces. In some sense, they’re always leaving for work and all she knows our their backs as they leave her day after day.

Sun and her husband end up making an agreement to respect each other’s business hours and to take turns caring for Somi. As if her motherhood is merely a page from the company’s policy, Sun struggles under the pressure of being an executive and a parent. But Somi’s drawing changes a few seconds of Sun’s routine — when she drops Somi off at the daycare, even while on the phone, she remembers the drawing and looks back at Somi so that her daughter sees her face.

At that moment we realize that there are always limits to what we can do and that not every move will be a grand success. Instead, Sun discovers the joy of partial success and a new strategy to life. It is moments like these that resonate with Yoon’s South Korean readership.

Rae

Keep on Going

And partial success is all that the character Rae can hope for. When we first meet him, he is getting close to the end of his 2-year contract with the company. His dream is to get a full-time contract.

Korea has a unique hiring system. With enough skills and degrees, people can be hired as permanent employees. Of course, you can be fired as soon as the company doesn’t need you, but that’s another story. So you can imagine if a well-educated and privileged person can be fired at will, what might happen to someone who is not, like Rae. Korean business has a reputation for rarely supporting limited term employees. Those who get full-time contracts are quite small. The company couldn’t care less for Rae, a high school graduate with a GED. He will always be tangential to their concerns.

Returning to the GO metaphor, though, his stones are like any other black and white stone on the board, which is to say that he is at one and the same time free to make moves and caught in a system hostile to his skills and needs. GO is not only complex, but also cruel. Nevertheless, that is the moment when Rae gives you the most valuable lesson in Incomplete Life: don’t give up no matter what.

Rae keeps on searching for jobs after his time with the company is over. He gets a job with a small company that needs him. You may expect a dramatic transition in Incomplete Life, but that is not what happens. Those types of success stories are for Hollywood movies. Instead, he just kind of putters a long, kind of making it. Rae’s story is one of the best and most moving of the batch.

There is no guarantee that a comic strip can enrich someone’s life or a country’s. But the beauty of Incomplete Life is that it challenges the many pressures of life in Korea. There are no superheroes; only people who quietly recalibrate their lives for the better in a complex and cutthroat GO board of a world.


©Gunner Shin and the CCA Arts Review