Korean manhwa and animation: Goong and Full House

For this post I will talk about the manhwa (Korean comic book) and live-action dramas based on them. For general information about the manhwa art form read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhwa. I feel that they are really similar to Japanese manga (comic book) but the art style (at least the ones I read) are quite different...

As many of you probably know, the drama Goong is based on a manhwa (Korean comic book). What may be new to you though is the fact that there is another very popular Korean drama - Full House based on a Korean manhwa.

Full House is based on a premise that a girl's house is bought by a movie star without her knowledge and because the house was built by the girl's father she refuses to move out so she works for the movie star as a housekeeper and they live together and fall in love. The manhwa is by Sooyeon Won and I read it in Chinese (Lang4 Man4 Man3 Wu1) 2-3 years ago.

The drama is based on the manhwa with some changes... It stars Rain and Song Hye Kyo (who I think is one of the prettiest Korean actresses out there) and first ran in 2004 (though I watched it in Chinese in summer 2005). It was, I believe, the most popular drama of that year and in my opinion, is a classic for the Korean romantic comedy genre.

More interesting though are the changes they made when they adapted the manhwa into drama. The manhwa took place in England and Rain's character and his rival are both supposed to be British... In addition, there wasn't really a rival for Song's character (Kang Hye Won didn't exist in the manga)...as far as I remember. Therefore, it was interesting to see that the drama localized (made Koream) the manhwa (took out all the European references) and formulated the drama so it followed the 2 main girls and 2 main guys classic formula that I mentioned in my last post. Finally, there was no trip to China in the beginning and Song's 2 friends who betrayed her aren't in the manga either. Overall, however, I still feel that this was a good drama even with the changes.

The main point of this entry is to comment on the phenomenon of making comics into dramas which seems to be going on throughout Asia. As many of you probably know, Japan has been doing this for a while with its own comics (manga). GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka) is a classic example of this. So is Gokusen, Kimi wa petto, Nodame Cantabile, etc (and it has been doing a very good job as these dramas are amoung some of my favorites). In addition, Taiwan, does this extremely often too, though using Japanese comics (as it really doesn't have its own comic industry...but if anybody is curious there is a decent, in my opinion, Taiwanese comic series called Youth Gone Wild) in the examples of Meteor Garden, It started with a kiss, Tokyo Juliet, and HanaKimi (which xiaokang mentioned last week). Even China makes dramas out of comics too if you think of Pink Ladies (涩女郎) which is based on a comic by a Taiwanese artist 朱德庸 (Zhu1 De2 Yong1).

So the question remains is why are so many dramas being made out of comics? Are these countries trying to promote their own comic book industries? If so why are Taiwan and China jumping on the bandwagon since they don't really have comic book industries? Finally, does anybody have an opinion on the future viability of Korean manhwa. Do you think if will be as popular as the Japanese manga and be able to as Korean dramas are these days, replace the Japanese medium/version of it?

PS. if anybody wants to read some Korean manhwa in english you can look at http://koreanmovies.free.fr/, to download some free, UNLICENSED (thus hopefully NOT illegal), korean scanslations though you might have to use IRC.