[비즈한국] “It’s right here.”
Ever since I read the short story collection ‘Fruit Cocktail’ more than 20 years ago, whenever I passed Myeongdong Cathedral in the middle of summer, I would peer into every alleyway looking for a snack shop that sold strawberry bingsu (shaved ice). It was because the final scene of the manga, where characters Joo-young and Mi-ri go looking for a strawberry bingsu shop in a secluded alley behind the cathedral, had left a lasting impression on me. I’m not fond of sweets or cold food, and I had no idea if the space was a product of the author’s imagination or a place long gone, but whenever I was in the area, I would vaguely find myself looking for “that place.”
When I met author Han Hye-yeon at a waffle shop near Sookmyung Women’s University, I told her I could never find that shop behind the cathedral, asking if it was a treasure island that never existed or a treasure ship that had vanished at some point. Her quiet remark, “It’s right here,” made me feel like this story was just like one of her mangas. It felt as if Joo-young and Mi-ri might open the door and walk in at any moment, wiping away sweat. The strawberry bingsu placed in front of us shone like a Christmas tree.
“Another month finished”
The author has a long-standing connection with the area in front of Sookmyung Women’s University. The high school she attended, the place where she would sneak out during night self-study sessions to read comics, the place where she once lived alone, and this waffle shop—which she has frequented since 1990, the year after it opened—are all near the university. Now residing in Icheon, the author says this neighborhood, along with Samcheong-dong, known for its sujebi (hand-pulled dough soup) and red bean porridge, is a place she never fails to visit when in Seoul.
Back when waffles were still unfamiliar, the author first encountered them at this shop. Although the menu now offers a much wider variety of waffles than before, the author consistently sticks to the ‘Butter & Jam’ waffle labeled ‘classic.’ The Korea-style waffle, with butter and apple jam spread inside the freshly baked dough, offered an impressive moist texture and flavor.
The strawberry bingsu, which the author considers her top pick, is also this shop’s signature menu. Made with finely shaved ice, topped with sugar-preserved strawberries, syrup, condensed milk, and soft-serve ice cream, the bingsu was less sweet and more refreshing than those found elsewhere.
Unlike today, when bingsu is sold year-round, thirty years ago it was only available in the summer. Although she lived in a small place without a refrigerator, the author, who loved iced coffee, would order strawberry bingsu to-go from this shop every time. The owner would shave the ice with a blue Japanese-made ice machine and pack the remaining ice separately; the author would use that ice to make iced coffee to get through the summer.
In the early 2000s, when she was active as a published manga artist, she would head straight to the publishing company to hand in her manuscripts—two 40-page sections, for a total of 80 pages each month—before coming here. Since she sometimes struggled with ideas and would rush to finish right up until two days before the deadline, the strawberry bingsu was her way of celebrating a month successfully completed.
The strawberry bingsu, a companion to her grueling creative life, has even become a source of inspiration. The feeling of intimacy she felt when someone she met—who seemed nothing like her—said they also loved the strawberry bingsu here, led to the characters of Joo-young and Mi-ri in the aforementioned ‘Fruit Cocktail’.
Imagination Rooted in Daily Life
Although the works Han Hye-yeon has released over the past 30 years are categorized into various genres, they converge on a single foundation: realism. Claiming she lacks imagination as an author, she sought inspiration for her comics by poring over newspapers and investigation notes in libraries. She seems to have gained the drive to pursue her own thematic consciousness from the “truth stranger than fiction” mentioned by Byron and Mark Twain.
Her short social experience, having become an author right after graduating from an all-girls middle school, high school, and university, was filled by listening all night to the complaints of friends who were working in companies. Her exploration of human life hidden beneath social structures took place during those nights. Because her works proceeded from things she personally experienced, encountered, and empathized with in everyday life, readers were able to immerse themselves in unfamiliar topics without hesitation. This is precisely why she, currently a faculty member at CK University of Culture & Design, encourages her students to start their creative process from small, everyday things and the relationships closest to them.
In fact, regarding the shorts ‘Her Christmas’ and ‘Adults’ Christmas’—which earned her the nickname “Christmas Cartoonist”—the author has mentioned in other interviews that they arose from the extension of her feelings that being happy meant eating Christmas cake, lounging with her cats, and reading comics. While Han Hye-yeon does not explicitly define or aim for specific genres, she weaves together emotions she has carefully observed and stored in her memory through these mediums.
Just a Cartoonist
The author captured the stories within her reach to depict the world beyond her height. Much like in certain verses, she sought to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. Therefore, even though she drew from subjects close and familiar to her as a woman, labeling her works as “women’s comics,” “feminist comics,” or “gender/queer” based on a few visible features might be a hasty attempt that restricts the potential for rich appreciation. In fact, she says she did not consciously think about themes or genres while working, and she never received such orders from publishers. Unlike the public perception defining her as a “representative author of women’s/feminist comics,” she dryly describes herself simply as “just a cartoonist.”
Of course, her works can be interpreted from a feminist perspective in the sense that they provide in-depth observations of hidden beings and under-spoken subjects, telling them as narratives. One could infer the uniqueness and direction of her comics from her intellectual experience studying at Ewha Womans University, a hub of feminist discourse, and her experience in amateur comic clubs in the 80s and 90s that were unconstrained by gender distinctions. There is a need for a deep analysis of the meaning she left in the gutters between the panels.
‘Bread-Baking Cat’, ‘Se-hwa, On the Way’, and What’s Next
Her recent work ‘Se-hwa, On the Way,’ selected as one of the ‘Today’s Korean Comics’ of 2024, uses temple food as its subject matter. The comic depicts the lives and healing of various people exhausted by the world, centered around a temple’s kitchen. As can be seen from the delicately depicted details, the author spent about two years studying temple food and Buddhist culture after being proposed the project by a publishing company. While it is common for most authors to live on delivery food and neglect their diet once serialization begins, she actually took care of her health by preparing various temple foods herself during the serialization of this work.
She even obtained a baking certification while preparing the predecessor to this work, ‘Bread-Baking Cat,’ and she has utilized various foods, including strawberry bingsu, as subject matter in her works even before that. When I asked her if she had a special interest in food, she replied, “Food is the best subject for talking about daily life.”
As such, in Han Hye-yeon’s works, food is less an end in itself and more a medium for expressing a character’s daily life, serving to reveal the character’s background and relationships. In the ‘Han-seong Genetics’ episode of ‘Strange Biology’, men who left all holiday preparations to women—only to keep them from touching the food—are wiped out by an unknown poison. Regarding the scenes in the ‘Food Chain’ episode, which was also featured in the comic mook ‘BOB’, the author revealed she drew it while “thinking about the act of devouring the corpses of other lives and absorbing the energy stored while those lives were alive during the one minute it takes to mix rice” (from the author’s note).
When asked about her next project, the author said she is thinking about a ‘spicy’ mystery subject—her specialty—for the first time in a while. She hinted that the subject is Christian eschatology, and her next work, which will be quite different from the ‘mild flavor’ of the Buddhist-themed ‘Se-hwa, On the Way’, is already highly anticipated.
Whether it’s ‘Strange Biology,’ which makes full use of her biology major, or other unique subjects, her works are characterized by prioritizing realistic yet plain depictions of human relationships regardless of the genre or topic.
Her works can be broadly divided into ‘spicy flavor’ and ‘mild flavor.’ If ‘Strange Biology’ or ‘Aechong’—which takes the Baebaekgyo pseudo-religion incident that swept through the Japanese colonial period as a motif—are typical ‘spicy,’ then her Christmas shorts, the webtoon ‘Se-hwa, On the Way’ (2023), and ‘Bread-Baking Cat’ can be classified as ‘mild.’
At the end of the interview, the author said she felt the ‘ultimate’ of comics while watching author Miyeok-ui-hyoneung’s ‘Ah, I Left My Wallet’ and ‘Chickens Are Surprisingly Great.’ She expressed admiration for how it showed that even without elaborate art or complex stories, one could convey messages clearly to readers “like telepathy,” and that it showed one could convey things clearly as a comic without pushing art to extreme levels like Kentaro Miura’s ‘Berserk.’ Perhaps author Han Hye-yeon felt that her own creative style—delivering relationships and emotions through plain art and casual dialogue without overly long explanations—was similar to those works.
A born serial manga artist who says deadlines make her draw, she has been a faculty member at the School of Comics and Animation at CK University of Culture & Design since 2011, passing on her experience and know-how as an author to her students.