There are really many people and their relationships, and exactly that many conflicts and quarrels. Even if this world is where people hate others even for no reason, the most common cause of conflicts seems to be money and passion. Money, needless to say, controls the capitalist society, and many people cross a line they shouldn’t cross for their passion for love, as an old cliché of mystery fictions says, when a person soon-to-be married is killed, by 80% probability the criminal is the person’s fiancée. 

In the famed Lezhin Comics webtoon Bas Boss, the tragic events are complicated with money and passion in their deeper bases.

By the way, at the beginning of each episode of Bad Boss, they warn the readers not to do unauthorized use, duplication, or sharing. As you already know, Bad Boss is a work serialized from Lezhin Comics’ very early days, and the warning tells us how Lezhin Comics take serious on the piracy issue. The warning isn’t in the recent works. The warning can’t look good on the eyes of the readers who already paid. 

Simply put, the personality of the appearing characters can be summarized like this: ‘Among these many people, (almost) no one is a good person’.

Kwon Seung-gyu is the most active person in the work. When he was in college, he was deceived by Kim Min a student in the same college at that time, and bought stocks only to lose his money for university tuition and his living expenses. Moreover, as Kim Min took out a private loan with his name, he had to become a host and do prostitution to repay the loan. After he caught a sponsor, a famous actress Baek Hyemi to repay all his debt, pulled himself out from there, and hid himself from the world for a while, now he’s a competent employee in an advertisement agency.

One day, Kim Min, who gave him an irreversibly humiliating past, comes into the agency as a new recruit. Then he makes up his mind to get his revenge. Kim Min is in deep crush on a coworker Choi Young-jo, and they already became close as they attended to the same educational institute.

As Seung-gyu read the obvious facts, he comes between them and he seduces and play with Young-jo, to achieve his revenge against Kim Min. With his long experience as a host, good-looking appearance, and ability as a competent worker, it was a piece of a cake. At the same time, Min gets severe pressure in his workplace, and naturally come to hate Seung-gyu.

Of course, as Seung-gyu’s complicated past is not buried forever, he faces crises for his complicated relationships and intervention of side characters. Baek Hyemi, his former sponsor, is frantically searching for him, and Ju Se-yeon, who he met for a physical and light relationship, makes things difficult for him with her unexpectedly morbid obsession.

Hatred and love of the complicated and tangled characters gradually rushes toward a catastrophe.

People are restrained in many ways before they choose an extreme measure. Moral, legal, and social constraints and people’s eyes keep them from doing it. But when one loses the reason or is involved with a dead-angled part of society, like prostitution or an isolated workplace, the person tends to seek a resort in an extreme measure more easily.

The consecutive tragic events in Bad Boss make us think ‘nobody is normal in here’, but the development is not awkward in any sense.

By gradual development of the story, the characters are psychologically and financially cornered at a dead end, and the readers can’t just deny the situation -- as they saw the characters’ twisted relationships and personalities -- no matter how they are shocked.