‘He Does A Body Good’ is a monumental work in the history of Korean Mature webtoon; it enjoyed major popularity, it started its serialization from Lezhin Comics’ early days, it gathered the readers from mouth to mouth, and it’s finished after almost 3 years of serial publishing, not stopping despite of the vast amount. It would be meaningless if I review such a monumental webtoon in a common way. And there’d be no fun, either. So, in this article of review, I’m going to discuss on the technical and structural excellence of ‘He Does A Body Good’. In short, in a line: ‘how did this webtoon earn a big popularity?’

First, the drawing quality is not a thing to discuss long. For Lezhin Comics’ early days and for even now as I’m writing this, its drawing is outstanding. Since I’m not an expert on drawing, so I’ll pass the part. You can see it yourself by your own eyes.

The structure of ‘He Does A Body Good’ is simple. It’s a textbook answer how to lead a full-length mature webtoon without making it boring. The secret can be broken down into these three: 1) a plausible pretense to have sex; 2) The main story connected to the pretense; and 3) an adequate allocation of the main heroine and the secondary heroines. Let’s have a brief look at each of them.

#1 is connected to its title. ‘The Man Does A Body Good’, the protagonist, Hosang, was an ordinary Korean man and he gains a kinda supernatural ability by an accident. The ability makes anyone who gets a physical contact with him to feel high, and furthermore, give a strong sexual impulse to them. Hosang is hardly able to control his ability and an army of girls comes to gather near him.

So far, the setting’s not so special. If I have to pick a merit or cleverness on the setting, I’d say it made good use of the narrative license the genre allows to decisively squash realism or objectivity which only provoke a useless controversy, and it succeeded in mitigate the reader’s repulsiveness to clueless harems at least a little.

It is more important now on from #2. This webtoon has its own storyline. Of course, the purpose is greatly inclined to satisfy a certain basic instinct, but it has a minimal storyline. The storyline is closely connected to the #1 and it gives the webtoon a purpose of the story and a minimal tension (other than having sex), rather than making the male protagonist drag the story endlessly with sex. It’s not very impressive – and it doesn’t have to – but as the episodes go on, Hosang runs into a quite serious crisis, he overcomes the crisis, and he finally scores a goal; and these constitute a simple and clear narrative structure of the story.

#3 is as important as #2. Hosang’s harem expands greatly, but the main heroine, who Hosang likes and also the most expected character of the readers, has a firm standing. He is entangled with many women but it’s merely a fan service. It is remarkable that the main heroine succeeded in appealing her attractiveness to the readers more than the other secondary heroines. It successfully secured her personality to be stood out as a female protagonist, and in the aspect of the narrative, it successfully explained the chance and the process how she becomes close to the male protagonist. Thanks to this, the readers can concentrate to the story, expecting the advance of his relationship with the main heroine, who is tantalizing a bit, not like any secondary heroines.

In fact, those three components from #1 to #3, is a textbook approach of any mature media added with narrative like I mentioned above, rather than being a unique merit of ‘He Does A Body Good’. As it is written it may not look like difficult things to do, but it’s easier said than done to keep the balance between the story and the scenes for fan service. Of course, no matter how the structure is, the drawing should support the story to achieve a commercial success. By brilliantly performing these assignments, ‘He Does A Body Good’ could remain as a big hit.