Alarm 
My Page 
Favorites 
Dark Mode 
Youtube 
Instagram 
Twitter 
Facebook Other
Silence is Golden, <God of High School>
김채윤 기자
| 2019-08-01 18:10
No one would've expected a serious story from the artist Park Yong-jae 's [God of High School], which gained a lot of popularity due to it's spectacular action scenes and a simple plot in which student from all over the country are gathered to fight each other. When you see webtoons with meaningless prefixes in the title, such as GOD, SUPER and ULTRA, it's best to empty your head.[God of High School] was already fun to read thanks to the hero's impressive actions and other breathtaking presentations. Even if the webtoon only depicted a power show by bringing back the great figures of the past, as long as the actions were good, the readers were able to turn their blind eyes and wait for Jin Mori's cool fight scenes every episode.
The secret to the popularity of [God of High School] that was ranked as one of the top LINE webtoons by being referred to as 'ShinNoGod' along with Tower of God and Noblesse was indeed it's simplicity. Simplicity doesn't mean bad. The setting in which high school students fight with each other in a martial arts competition is attractive to anyone. The ability to come up with such material and actually execute it was one of the artist Park Yong-jae's greatest talents.
However, Park Yong-jae showed somewhat disappointing aspects in terms of presenting the emotional lines of the characters. If you take a look at only one panel separately, the expressions within the frame would be fine, but the emotional lines didn't get carried over to the next panel quite often. The above scenes from episode 2 is a typical example. As you read them, the characters' movements don't get connected very well. Furthermore, even in terms of writing dialogues, the artist also showed a lot of unfortunate aspects. He has a habit of putting dots to give sentences an impact like t.h.i.s. However, as the dialogues themselves weren't written that nicely, his such habit served as the lessons to let the readers know how bad his dialogues were.
As the webtoon progressed, the size of it's world became larger and so did the scale of the actions. However, the artist's capabilities could not keep up to such grown scale of actions. The most notable example was when he illustrated the cloning technique of a certain character. In the scene, the villain beats the main character by producing clones of him in an overwhelming quantity. However, as the artist actually specifies the number of created clones, the scene itself very much becomes weird.
In fact, this scene can explain all the disadvantages of Park Yong-jae . He couldn't write the right dialogues for the scene and illustrate the scene that should've conveyed the emotions that had to be felt by both the characters and the readers, regardless of whether they were fear, love, or sadness. Moreover, he disturbed the reader's last remaining bits of immersion by making a spelling mistake. Personally, I don't like the way he uses the word 'estimate'. Even though he mentions specific figures, he claims that such numbers are only an estimate in the end, which breaks the reader's imagination and doesn't give any clear information.
In fact, it could've been better without putting such dialogues. The artist is trying to add too many lines while drawing action scenes that do not necessarily need dialogues. The burst of dialogues which demonstrate the artist's desire to look cool and his obsession for excessive storytelling definitely undermine his strengths as an action comics artist. Perhaps the most ideal condition for Park Yong-jae to show his best abilities would be to work as an illustrator utilizing his advantages in portraying actions. In terms of story writing, the artist obviously needs to get help from others. Or otherwise, he can just keep the story as simple as possible. We want to behold Park Yong-jae 's actions. If we wish to enjoy a wonderful fantasy story, we would've read Lee Yeong-do's novels already.
