When I read comments on webtoons these days, I found many readers who try to find some type of ‘message’ that authors try to convey. The presence of underlying messages often means the quality of the webtoon is high, and webtoons that make readers think more often get better critics.

But sometimes, I just want to scroll down and skim through while on the subway to work. On usual occasions, I prefer webtoons that deal with thought-provoking subjects or ones that powerfully appeal their authors’ messages, but my brain is not meant for deep thinking all day. 

If you want to stop thinking while reading webtoons, I have one recommendation for you, which is <God of Highschool> on Line Webtoon. Every stories and characters in this webtoon are fictional except that the story is taking place in Seoul. Many high-schoolers with different wishes show up to this crazy competition called G.O.H.(God Of Highschool) where the strongest winner gets one wish to become true. All elements of this webtoon including overall plot development and sense of humor is full of goofiness and childish stories. Readers have split opinions about the goofiness of the story, but what makes this webtoon really popular is its ‘Action’.

Thanks to drawings by cartoonist Park Yong Jae who showed his skills on drawing action scenes since his last work ‘Tough Guy’, this webtoon gets its so called ‘quality’.    

The main content of this webtoon is mostly hack-and-slash action which lets readers to understand the story without even reading character’s lines or caring too much about the story. This shows that this webtoon’s only goal is to show pure action to readers who find the webtoon’s this endeavor to be genuine. 

Every episode is full of feisty action and it gathers its intensity every episode so that readers don’t get bored.

Problem that pops up here is keeping the power balance between characters. This kind of problem was easily seen in Japanese shonen mangas (Naruto, Bleach), and GOH has similar problems for same reasons. 

Actions such as Tsunami hitting on Korea and Yeouibong getting so big that it covering the Earth was probably because the cartoonist, Park Yong Jae felt too much pressure to make every action more intense. Many fans criticized the webtoon’s increasing brutality and “spiciness”. 

Scenes with characters getting their limbs cut off and body smash into half... well I guess this is one of the side effects of too many overpowered characters showing up.

What’s good news, though, is that “the Korean team” (Jin Mori, Han Daewi, Yu Mira), with lesser screen time lately than in the beginning part, is entering the tournament again so the story’s focus is coming back to our protagonists. 

Even though Jin Mori is replaced with his avatar Hwi Mori, Han Daewi and Yu Mira getting back their deserved ‘share’ of this webtoon was long-awaited rain for readers who has been reading since the beginning. Also fantasy concepts like “Gods” in the story are being well explained and settling in to shape, which lets the cartoon to progress with better smoothness and focus more to its action. This makes me think ‘GOH after consolation rounds’ got its unique charms that this cartoon had in the beginning back.    

 

There must be readers who are still criticizing. No matter how much good I write about this webtoon, there’s too much left to be criticized about this webtoon. It’s too goofy, so there’s not much more to say. It’s like there’s no reason trying to find the whitest spot on the white paper. Instead, there’s no other better webtoon that shows this exciting action, and this is the unrivaled charm that you can find only on this webtoon.