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Korean comic book room of the 1970s and ’80s installed at University of Washington

April 6, 2015
A South Korean comic book room of the 1970s and '80s was installed inside the University of Washington.

A South Korean comic book room of the 1970s and ’80s was installed inside the University of Washington.

A comic book room straight out of the 1970s and ’80s in South Korea, stocked with popular cartoonists of the time, opened inside the University of Washington last week.

The installation — complete with a black-and-white television inside — was part of a manhwa (Korean cartoons) festival hosted by the university with the goal of giving a taste of the past to Koreans of a certain generation, and a taste of the new to 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans and young students.

Set up by Korean American students and led by senior landscape architecture student Oh Eun-ji, the room involved hours of digging around the Internet to acquire manhwas of the time from authors like Lee Hyun-se, Heo Young-man and Hwang Mi-na.

Hyokyoung Yi, head of Korean Studies at East Asia Library, said drawings of characters from popular series of the ’70s and ’80s had been added to the room.

Yoon Tae-ho, the author of the original webtoon series “Misaeng” and the event’s special guest, also left drawings of characters from his hit series, she said.