Writing and drawing, says Keum Suk Gendry-Kim (Goheung-gun, 1971), heals wounds, lightens the weight of the most adverse circumstances. “For me, writing is a form of therapy, of healing,” explains the cartoonist alongside a copy of ‘Tomorrow will be another day’ (Reservoir Books), a graphic novel in which the author of the acclaimed ‘Hierba’ and ‘The Wait ‘documents the intimate drama of a couple who cannot conceive a child. An everyday tragedy aggravated by the pressure of a society that, Gendry-Kim points out, continues to blame women for infertility problems. «Korean society has been a complete patriarchal system for hundreds of years. There has been a lot of social oppression towards women and, even today, the idea persists in certain rural areas of the country that if a couple cannot have children, it is the woman’s fault,” she says. Or, as the protagonist, a 34-year-old woman named Bada, says in one of the vignettes, “some time ago, women were guilty only for being born as such, and if they did not have a male child, they were expelled from the family.” home”. The author of ‘Perros’ also knows well what she is talking about, since ‘Tomorrow will be another day’ is an openly and starkly autobiographical comic. “When I was 30 years old we tried to have a child, but we couldn’t,” she explains. She became pregnant, suffered several miscarriages and resorted to in vitro fertilization worse, just like Bada in the book, she was unable to have children. «I think I suffered for about 10 years. At that time, I wrote a lot of diaries and tried to make short comics, but it was too difficult,” he admits. A series of vignettes from ‘Tomorrow will be another day’ ABC Almost twenty years had to pass before he decided to tell a story that, Despite its apparent intimate dimension, it is in tune with the historical traumas of ‘Herb’ and ‘The Wait’, where Gendry-Kim addressed the drama of the “comfort women” converted into sexual slaves of the Japanese army during the Second World War and the family fractures during the Korean War. Interior vignettes from ‘Tomorrow will be another day’ ABC«These are themes that are not far away from me. The war, the victims…It’s something that I have at home. Because although it deals with a historical element, the protagonists are my relatives. My mother, for example, lived through the separation of South Korea. Before writing a book I look for the topic in my personal life, so even though ‘Herb’ and ‘The Wait’ have been generalized to a historical fact, the beginning has always been my environment,” he says. We will have to see how all this is articulated in ‘My Friend Kim Jong-un’, a graphic novel that will be published in Spain next year and in which the author turns the biography of the North Korean dictator into this “a message of urgency for the peace.”Extreme competitivenessGendry-Kim, who published his first comics while living in France, where he lived for more than fifteen years, also explores in ‘Tomorrow will be another day’ the deep emotional and family wounds that his protagonists carry, in a way to highlight the deficiencies of a society overwhelmed by the weight of expectations. «Of course, there is a critical perspective on the philosophy and values of the present and society, but I never criticize something directly. I think readers have to find that perspective by reading and thinking,” he explains. The Nobel and the Oscar speak Korean thanks to the Internet Taking advantage of the fact that Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s visit to Barcelona comes shortly after the Nobel Prize in Literature to his compatriot Hang Kan, we asked her what she believes is the secret of South Korean culture to conquer the world and crown from the Olympus of letters to the seventh art with ‘Parasites’. Your answer? Internet. And also a little luck. «I suppose there will be some government support, but I think it is the culture itself. Korea has been a weak country for years, but modern times and globalization have allowed culture to expand and Korean artists to be known throughout the world,” he reflects. There is, for example, San, a male protagonist crushed by the father figure. “You will not survive in this society if you do not achieve first place,” we read on a page smudged with ink. “To be second is to have failed in the attempt to be first,” adds a father always ready to let himself be disappointed. «In Korean society nothing is possible unless you are first. There is no place for seconds. There is a lot of competition between parents to brag to teachers, a lot of tension. With social networks, in addition, the intensity of violence has skyrocketed. That is why so much time and money is invested in education: all students go to academies to work overtime and parents look for the best academies, the most expensive, to differentiate themselves,” he explains. Related News standard Yes The Nobel to Han Kang and the ‘Squid Game’ syndrome Karina Sainz BorgoMoney, also here (and there), as a segregating and fixing element of increasingly sharpened class differences. «In Korea, those who do not have money cannot compete. By no means. On one side are the so-called ‘golden spoon’ families and on the other those of the ‘earth spoon’. The first ones have money and the second ones have nothing. So if you come from a dirt-poor family, you can’t go to good schools or work overtime. That is why many children of these poor families aspire to be stars, idols,” he reflects. Hence, it is assumed, that endless quarry, half catwalk, half meat grinder, that K-pop has become.
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