The world does not roll as I want, for there’s always someone who does not agree with me. In the context, I wish everyone in this world has the same taste with me: loving to stay at home, play games, sleep until 12 o’clock, and wake up only to sleep again. I’m not telling you this because I got sudden tantrums from my parents to get a job. I just want to save some of your clicks on the back button during your webtoon search.

It may sound bad and cold, but the effort of an author to bear a work are not my concern. Even if the author climbed Mountain Everest to draw a flower in a background, it doesn’t concern me. But if the content of the day was a revenge story of a married women with her disguise with drawing a mole in the face, it can’t avoid my criticism even if the author visited Sea of Tranquility to draw it.

Let me be a bigot this one time. A comic should have realistic drawing style and should decorate its cover with girl’s underwear sometimes. The protagonist should be a gangster or a boy who is just and uncontrollably cheerful. It must be in black and white, too. Yes, that’s what a comic should be. The only true comic artists are like Park In-gwon or Kim Sung-mo.

I’m not sure anyone has such criteria like those for real, but of course every comic doesn’t need to be all the same. A comic boasts its individuality with an impressive story and directing despite its weak drawing, and another overwhelms the readers with drawing quality despite it has a comparatively simple story. Individuality is different by work, and it is necessary. But in this context, what is the individuality of 3-Second Strip? Does it have a unique world, distinguished from other comics? Or, does it use exotic expressions? Does it contain sharp sarcasm? Where does the 3-Second Strip locate in terms of these criteria?

A strong point of this work is, it can be read on your way to work, 5 days a week. That slice of the moment. In this work, there are fun and thinking conveyed for the time between a subway train departs a station and arrives at the next one. It is called Snack Culture – short contents that can used any time, anywhere. It means a popular that can be enjoyed lightly like a snack in a shop.

I don’t want to insist that every work should excel in their genre. If there’s only one work per genre, that would be an incomparably grim world. But if it wants to have length of 3-frame and simple drawing, it needs to show us how witty its expression could be. The work shows us familiar parodies again and again. It reuses the parody it used in it, and it says about basic virtues like filial duty or selfishness of people again. As they’re what we saw them again and again, we forget that soon. The author tells us that he will take 3 seconds from us, but what a creative work which would be forgotten after 3 seconds is for? That ‘you’ll forget this soon and I will talk anything I like’, is as same as that ‘I will not talk to you at all’.

I’m still in my early 20s, but maybe I’m not accepting the trend, fallen out of fashion. I’m swept as life sweeps, not following the stream of innovation and development, not defying the stream either, crying this like a weed stuck between two rocks: ‘hey, I’m still here’. What a sad thought. This age already defined the webtoon as Snack Culture, cutting things short to go ahead fast, but still I’m not accepting it, like I’m saying ‘this is how a comic should be’. Actually, it doesn’t need causality, drawing, direct or anything as long as it has many readers. If someone says, adjusting their glasses, ‘hmm, this work is messed up in terms of causality or directing’, it won’t matter at all; the answer is already decided, isn’t it? 

In conclusion, it’s about whether accept a cultural content that is to be enjoyed lightly or not. It’s about fun, away from things like causality, drawing, directing or something else. Fun is all that matters. This work always has done this way.