The trauma of the two Koreas in a masterful comic: 'The wait'

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If this summer the Korean cartoonist

left us absolutely impressed with

, a monumental 500-page comic in which she delved into the drama of the

during the Japanese occupation, in

( again in Reservoir Books), achieves the same effect with half the pages.

It is now about the subsequent tragedy of the families that were cut short when, after the fall of the Japanese empire, the no less brutal Russians arrived, and the country was settled with a clean ax blow along the 38th Parallel. Like thousands of Koreans, the cartoonist's mother, who is nailed to the protagonist of

, he has been waiting for more than 70 years

, of whom he knows nothing at all.

The 51-year-old cartoonist once again gives voice to the last generation that Korea knew when it was still one: "Yes, mine is a generation of transition between those who were direct victims of the war and today's youth, who see it from a more pragmatic perspective", explains the artist.

"Because North Korea is much more backward in economic terms, they think that, if reunification happens, it

. My mother's generation, however, has wanted to pass on to us the responsibility of not forgetting, and I have published these graphic novels "Above all, for these new generations. To try to prevent these painful stories from repeating themselves."

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Although, it is clear that History does not stop repeating itself -war returns again and again, and women continue to be harassed in the four corners of the planet- both

and

open an extraordinary window into the world's problems.

In other hands, they could have remained in an exhibition of atrocities: those

girls had nothing to do with

, ​​they were forced to "serve" lines of 30 or 40 soldiers a day in stinking barracks, and to top it off they called them " comfort women."

Page from the comic 'Waiting, by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim.

But Gendry-Kim

, and even turn reading into a contemplative experience.

In

, there is a terrifying moment during the great exodus south: time to pee and change a diaper, barely five minutes, and the woman returns to the road to find her husband and young son missing, only to forever.

She will never find out what happened to them.

But if Gendry-Kim manages to move us to the depths, it is thanks to the

, or rather to a diversity of styles (from the most caricatured to the most abstract) and page compositions, standardized by a rigorous black and white in Chinese ink, which also makes the different eras portrayed ally in the same whole: "I have never studied comics, I started translating them and I come from Fine Arts, so my style is very free. I could compare it with traditional music korean we call

, in which the singer performs a song for more than five hours, only accompanied by a musician who plays the drum to set the rhythm.

The singer concentrates all his energy in his voice, in the same way that I use the monochromatic tone to express my energy and my thoughts.

There are very nice color comics, but I think black and white makes the reader more focused, less distracted."

Indeed, it is impossible to take your eyes off the page.

If we were talking about New Age, which is not the case, it would be Music to disappear into.

Page from the comic 'Waiting, by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim.

At first glance,

may seem like the continuation of Grass, due to the main historical events that they portray, although both also refer to current problems -property speculation, the little attention we pay to our elders, because we are too busy-, dramas that tend to dwarf the magnitude of the tragedies of the past.

For her, "

.

I have also suffered real estate problems: it is said that to buy a house in Korea, you also have to sell your soul.

And besides, we are still at war, there was only one armistice, which implies that the war has not ended, that we have not been able to achieve a lasting and true peace.

The Korean peninsula is very small, and everything is within bomb range."

It is curious that, fleeing from a forbidding Seoul, he has settled in Gangwha, an island so close to the border: "Here I live surrounded by nature. There is an islet with a viewpoint where there are always families who have, or had, someone on the other side."

She has never been tempted to go to the other side to mark a Pyongyang, like Guy Delisle's, another graphic novel classic: "I was in China to document myself for

, and there the border with North Korea has nothing to do with it, it's a red stripe painted in the middle of a bridge. I crossed it like many tourists do, but I didn't go any further."

Meanwhile, her mother continues to call her from Seoul to find out if she has found any news about her sister on the Internet: "A few days ago she told me that she had seen a person who looked a lot like her on a television contest. She does not lose hope ".

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