On why I decided to make comics, or at least try to

From a very young age, I had always wanted to become a fiction writer.

Throughout my life, friends, family and acquaintances told me that I was a good writer. I wanted to write my own book, a bestseller just like the Harry Potter series! I thought. This was also more or less encouraged by my mother, who loved the idea of her child becoming an author so much that it became her own personal dream as well.

To a highly privileged, highly sheltered, academically excelling teenager, everything seemed simple; I will go to a good college and major in literature, graduate and get a good job, and then finally write my masterpiece that will, inevitably, become the next Harry Potter series.

I am now thirty years old and laugh at how shockingly naive past me had been.

My mother still hopes that I will write and publish a novel some day, but I don't know if it will ever be that easy.

For starters, I am a Korean national married to an American, and I am planning to spend the next chapter of my life in the United States in the foreseeable future. But due to multiple personal reasons I intend to retain my South Korean nationality if I could help it.

Would an American publishing agent ever have the motivation to publish the works of a Korean national? The answer is probably no, unless said Korean national had something unique and irreplaceable that they could offer to the American publishing agent, like incredible knowledge about South Korean history or culture, things like that. Things that are important, yes, but things that I am not necessarily interested in writing about at the current stage of my life.

This is to say, I don't want to write about Korean things just because I am Korean. I realize that representation and identity politics are important, but for me, the expectation that one MUST write about Korean things because they are Korean seems suffocating, like being pigeonholed into another stereotype. I realize everyone has different thoughts on this matter but that is my honest opinion.

Besides, I have not grown up as a racial minority in America. Despite having grown up as a culturally confused third culture kid, racially speaking, my sense of identity is more rooted to that of being a racial majority in South Korea.

Then why don't you publish in Korea, where there will be no weird racial and national expectations put upon you? The problem THERE is that my Korean writing is nowhere near as good as my writing in English. During my internship at a newspaper company, I was told by a journalist that my Korean writing needed work - until I told her that I had barely lived in Korea during the then twenty five years of my life. She quickly switched gears and said that my Korean writing was amazing considering my life situation. THAT is the extent of my Korean writing skills; good for someone who was barely educated in it, but very, very far from being journalistic or literature material from an objective standpoint.

So what is a person like me, a Korean national who can't write well enough in Korean to crack into the Korean literature scene, yet has nothing appealing to offer to the Anglosphere do?

Meanwhile, I have also heard from friends, family and acquaintances throughout my life that I was a good artist. Of course, I am far from the best, and after my artistic hiatus in college and grad school, where I barely drew anything with effort, my skills have definitely gotten rusty. But generally, I noticed that I had been able to draw more complicated shapes compared to others, and I would get compliments for it.

Despite being told all my life that I was a good artist, I kept my artistic endeavors secondary to my writing as my mother determined that a writing-based career would be more valuable in the long run compared to an art-based career. And I agreed with her for two reasons; one, I was a very picky artist and essentially hated drawing things that others dictated for me, which is... the entire point of an art career. Second, I drew well but had very little sense of design or composition, qualities that would carry one much further in more realistic art-based careers such as graphic design.

I did think to myself that I would like to illustrate my own book if the opportunity allowed it, but the idea to make a comic did not occur to me until 2016, when I suddenly thought of a bunch of original characters which got me back into drawing more regularly.

I really wanted to share the images and stories of my characters with others, and for that there already existed a perfect medium; comics. More precisely, webcomics.

I had never formally worked on a comic, as in, I have never self-published or posted any webcomics to a website or any comic platform, but I did remember my countless childhood endeavors trying to create my own "manga" volumes based on my characters (only to quit once I lost interest), and have also managed to complete several "American-style comic" volumes about my characters and their adventures. I remembered how much fun I had in making those comics. And I wanted to try it in a more serious manner this time, at least once in my life.

I know it won't be easy; in fact, creating a comic would require double or triple the amount of effort it takes to just write a book without having to worry about pictures and shot composition. But I believe to a person of my situation, who wants to write culturally nonspecific fiction and fantasy, but have no competitive edge to publish their works in either Korea and the US, and have dabbled a bit in drawing, a comic is probably the best way to go about things.

I know that my comic won't be a success; that my first work would probably suck. I also know that there would be moments where I am too depressed to work or spend hours filled with regret on my personal mission or feel guilty for not working on it enough.

But everyone has to start from somewhere.