Tag Archives: Dokebi Bride

Grief Without End

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This first ran on Comixology.
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Dokebi Bride is not easy to categorize. A Korean comic, it’s got the young female protagonist, the cute ancillary pet, the fantasy trappings, the giant-eyed waifs, and the flower-bedecked images typical of shojo comics for girls. But, on the other hand, it’s also got gratuitous, gross-out art — twisted corpses, mottled rotting monsters with faces growing out of their cheeks, crawling chattering things with their intestines on the outside — that are more typical of shonen horror comics for boys. The breathtaking covers, with subtle, luminous colors, also seem to reference children’s book art. The whole is one of the most distinctive manga-influenced comics styles I’ve seen, with clean, expressive layouts that juxtapose the lovely and the disgusting, the realistic and the fanciful.

The comics’ approach to narrative falls more subtly, but just as definitely, outside of easy genre categorization. The story centers on Sunbi, a young girl with shamanic powers that allow her to see spirits and the dead. You’d think, given that set-up, that the book might go one of two ways. It could be episodic, with Sunbi meeting and exorcising a series of ghosts in relatively neat, self-contained sit-comish episodes. Or you could have more of a long-form narrative adventure.

Dokebi Bride, though, refuses to plump firmly for either option. Instead, the story keeps shifting in and out of formula; it will establish a group of characters who seem to be the characters, and then it will drop them, sending Sunbi off in another direction entirely. Rob Vollmar, in a fine review of the series’ first volume at Comics Worth Reading, called that book a “prelude,” which it is. But, not having yet read the follow-up volumes, he couldn’t know that everything is prelude: Over the six volumes, Sunbi goes from a child living with her grandmother in the country to a teenager living in Seoul with her father to a runaway living on the streets without ever settling into a rhythm or routine. The book constantly wrong foots her, and the reader as well.

Early in the series, for example, the aforementioned cute ancillary pet — a dog who we’ve seen grow up from a puppy in the first book — leaps between Sunbi and an evil spirit. The dog is badly wounded, and Sunbi is forced to run out into the street. Later, she sees the dog running towards her in a classic Disney moment. “Solbang! You’re okay! I’m so relieved! I’m so —.” But the dog isn’t okay; its dead spirit has just come searching for her. And, to further twist the knife, Sunbi has been placed under magical protection to make her invisible to the spirit world for a time, and as a result, her dog can’t find her. The cute, beloved animal, which in most shojo narratives would be the series’ most identifiable, constant image, goes on into the afterlife in the second volume without ever saying goodbye.

That departure, I think, points to the core knot at the heart of Dokebi Bride. The book, like many ghost stories, is about grief and dislocation and how the two circle around each other like black, exhausted smudges. The first volume opens with Sunbi’s father carrying her mother’s ashes back from the grave; that volume ends with the death of Sunbi’s grandmother, who raised her and cared for her. The central loss of a parent, and therefore of self, returns again and again through the series, a literal haunting. Sunbi can’t function without putting the past behind her, but the past is everything she is — she can’t let it go. When a fortune teller offers to read her future, Sunbi rejects the offer angrily. “No, I don’t want to know about my stupid future!” she bites out through her tears. “Just tell me what all this means to me! Tell me why they’ve all died and left me, why they’re even trying to take away my memories!”
 

That may sound like a catharsis, and it kind of is. But, again, Marley’s narrative isn’t exactly linear or exactly episodic; instead it’s recursive. Sunbi’s conflict is mirrored on different levels, and in different iterations, in both the people and the spirits around her. In one story, Sunbi meets an old woman from the country looking for her grandson in Seoul; in another Sunbi meets a chef living with her crippled, mute mother, who she appears to hate for her infirmity. Each story ends at an impasse of inescapable, irrecoverable love. The grandmother’s search was precisely and already a year too late before it began; the chef ends the story begging her mother to be reincarnated as her daughter. “I will raise you tenderly, you’re so precious. I will beat up any bastards who make fun of you. So you won’t know any sorrow…so you won’t know any suffering…I will raise you so lovingly, like a flower….” I cry every time I read that. I just cried while writing it, for that matter.

What you’re supposed to do with grief, of course, is achieve closure and move on — ideally in 60 minutes, less commercial breaks. Or, to put it in more eastern terms, as Marley herself does occasionally, too much attachment is a bad thing. Except, of course, and at the same time, it isn’t. Sunbi is constantly being told that she needs to let go, both by people who don’t particularly understand or care about her (like her father and stepmother) and by people who do, like her grandmother. There’s obviously something to this; Sunbi’s attachment to and fears about her past makes her a beacon for unattached spirits, who are constantly trying to possess her. If she’s going to survive, she needs to harden her heart.

And yet, hardening your heart is not necessarily surviving, either. Sunbi realizes this herself, noting, “Grandma told me to live like someone who’s not heard or seen; that it’d be uncomfortable once I got involved in this kind of thing…but…I’m scared that I may not be able to cry, or laugh, if I keep on acting like someone else like this.” This isn’t simply an idle possibility; throughout Dokebi Bride Sunbi shows herself capable of remarkable coldness. When a therapist expresses empathy for the loss of Sunbi’s grandmother, Sunbi responds by using her mystical abilities to first divine and then sneer at the fact that the older woman has had a hysterectomy. This sort of thing happens repeatedly. When somebody tries to get to close to her — whether her father, her stepsister, or a nerdy schoolmate — Sunbi acts like a witch, literally. Sometimes she seems more or less justified; it’s hard to fault her when she uses her mystical connections to take out a number of creepy guys who are threatening her at a club, for example. But the issue isn’t really whether the folks on the receiving end get what’s coming to them, but what happens to Sunbi’s own soul when she reacts from hate and fear. It’s after she has the club guys beaten up that Sunbi first develops a rash on her arm…a rash which Marley clearly implies is a kind of karmic raw spot.

Sunbi defeats her assailants in this sequence by summoning a Dokebi, an ugly goblin spirit with whom Sunbi has a complicated relationship. Dokebi are both powerful and comically hapless. On the one hand, they can cast curses, are physically dangerous, and have access to seemingly limitless gold. On the other hand, they can’t buy anything with their gold because they can’t figure out how to exchange it for money, and they’re so unacquainted with personal hygience that if you smear paint on one, it can’t figure out how to wash it off. Sunbi uses this fact to ensnare her Dokebi, and force him to agree to a contract; she wipes the paint off his face, and in exchange he agrees to come and help her when summoned, aiding her against evil spirits or half-drunk shitheads at a club, as the case may be.

The relationship between Sunbi and her Dokebi is, however, a good bit more complicated than the initial master/servant dynamic would appear to suggest. Sunbi does berate and yell at the Dokebi as if he were an inferior — but for his part, the Dokebi follows Sunbi less for legalistic reasons than for romantic ones. He’s smitten with Sunbi, and while the sexual subtext here is played for laughs, it’s all the more blatant for that. To summon the Dokebi, Sunbi has to lick a ring — and each of those licks has a decidedly pleasurable effect on the Dokebi, who bounces around giggling ecstatically whenever Sunbi’s tongue touches the (ahem) stone.

Just as Sunbi is more than the Dokebi’s master, though, she’s also more than his (parodic) bride. When Sunbi is in trouble, the Dokebi comes and protects her. In a book as obsessed with parental bonds as this one is, that makes him a father-figure. Moreover, when Sunbi asks the Dokebi his name, he tells her he doesn’t have one, and so, as mothers do with children, she names him Gwangsoo, or “hands that shine a light.” No wonder that when Sunbi runs away from home and leaves Gwangsoo’s ring behind her, he falls into a sniveling depression, which is an exaggerated, comic-relief caricature of Sunbi’s own grief at the loss of her parent.

Gwangsoo eventually tracks Sunbi down, and Sunbi greets him gratefully…not so much because he saves her from danger (he actually screws that up) as because she’s happy to have a friend. That reconciliation leads to other, larger ones, as Sunbi seems, at last, to find a balance between protecting herself and caring for others, between holding on to her past and not letting that past consume her. This is a decent thumbnail definition of what it means to become an adult, and by the end of volume 6, Sunbi does, in fact, seem to have grown up.

Or maybe not. Volume 6 ends with a plot-twist that comes out of absolutely nowhere, and leads I have no idea where. I may never find out, either; according to an email from Soyoung Jung, the Vice President of Netcomics, “Dokebi Bride has been “indefinitely postponed…due to the author’s schedule conflict.” That’s obviously really disappointing — but in terms of the series itself, there is a kind of logic to it. Dokebi Bride is definitely a Bildungsroman that never ungs. The issues here don’t get resolved when you reach a certain age; they just change and don’t change. “I have completely overcome my fear of them,” Sunbi thinks near the last volume’s conclusion; a few pages later she’s shouting in terror. The wheel rolls on, and you don’t necessarily get to see where it’s going. Instead, all you can do is watch grief, love, death, and beauty spinning by, familiar and new, no matter how old you are, or how wise you hope you’ve become.
 

Dyspeptic Orobouros: Who Let That In Here, Anyway?

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Robert Stanley Martin’s post from a few days back has me thinking about comics and canons. Specifically, I’ve been trying more or less idly to figure out what my favorite comics are. Peanuts of course. Maybe Watchmen. Possibly Little Nemo. Those would all irritate Domingos, but they’re solidly mainstream choices.

I was a little disturbed though to discover that Marley’s Dokebi Bride may make my list.

Probably most people reading this haven’t heard of Dokebi Bridge. It’s a Korean manhua YA coming of age story that I read a couple years back. It was never finished; it ends on a cliff-hanger at the end of volume 6. I wrote a very enthusiastic review at Comixology.

The book, like many ghost stories, is about grief and dislocation and how the two circle around each other like black, exhausted smudges. The first volume opens with Sunbi’s father carrying her mother’s ashes back from the grave; that volume ends with the death of Sunbi’s grandmother, who raised her and cared for her. The central loss of a parent, and therefore of self, returns again and again through the series, a literal haunting. Sunbi can’t function without putting the past behind her, but the past is everything she is — she can’t let it go. When a fortune teller offers to read her future, Sunbi rejects the offer angrily. “No, I don’t want to know about my stupid future!” she bites out through her tears. “Just tell me what all this means to me! Tell me why they’ve all died and left me, why they’re even trying to take away my memories!”

So, yes, I liked it a lot — more than any other reviewer I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure. Michelle Smith, for example, has a much more mixed reaction. (Interestingly, the things she dislikes — the way the plot stutters back and forth without seeming sure where it’s going — is something that kind of made the series for me.)

But anyway. The point is, there’s a pretty big gap between saying, “I liked this,” or even “I loved this” and saying, “You know, I think this is one of the best comics ever. It’s going in my canon!” People can forgive the first as a harmless eccentricity. The second, though, starts to look like carelessness.

I’m not going to try to make the case for Dokebi Bride as one of the all time all times here. It’s interesting to think about why making that case is futile though. What exactly could I say that would make Dokebi Bride seem like it deserved canonicity, anyway? I love the series, and (as in my essay) I think I can make a pretty sustained argument as to why it’s good or even great (not that I’d convince anyone, but I can make the argument.) I could even point out that many things that have actually made it into the canon to some degree (like, say, Herge’s Tintin or the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man or Maus) are less thoughtful or moving than Dokebi Bride (at least in my opinion.)

But canonicity is about more than just quality. It’s also about influence and centrality — it’s about the art forms’ narrative. And it’s very hard to make an argument in which an unfinished Korean genre series with middling reviews is important to comics.

This brings up a question which I’ve thought about in some other contexts,namely — could the best comic ever written be something that nobody’s ever seen? Could some random mini-comic in a drawer somewhere be the best thing ever? Can the quality of an aesthetic object be abstracted from its context and its place in history? If Tintin appeared now as a children’s book, largely ignored by the comics mainstream, would it be a classic? Would Tsuge?

Of course, no one thinks Dokebi Bride is better than Tintin, much less Tsuge. I look ridiculous for suggesting it. And that’s part of what canons are there for too. Canons legitimize the works of art, but they also legitimize, or deligitimize the people making the canons. Canons are a way of determining who is and who is not with the program. They’re lines in the sand.

Choosing Dokebi Bride for a canon is its own kind of line; it suggests a perverse contrarianism, perhaps. To pick as canonical something no one else thinks of as canonical doesn’t mean you’re any less beholden to the conventional wisdom. It just means your defined through opposition. You may not be onboard the truck, but that just means you’re tied to the bumper (possibly screaming impotent obscenities.)

Which brings me to the reason that I, in general, both dislike canons and find myself fascinated by them. Robert pointed out that canons change over time. They’re not fixed; people alter them. Which is certainly true. But, at the same time, canons alter art, and, by extension, people. The things that are considered great and important affect how you relate to new works, how you relate to the art form….and even how you relate to yourself. I noted above that I was a little disturbed to discover myself thinking about Dokebi Bride as a canonical work. That disturbance didn’t appear out of nowhere; it was put there by the canon, which functions in this situation as a kind of conscience or superego.

So should we just get rid of canons then? Throw off the beady-eyed superego and frolic joyfully in whatever pop pleasures of the id present themselves? Well, maybe. If people don’t want to think too much about canons, that’s reasonable.

On the other hand, canons do, like superegos, provide a shared set of norms — a communal way to talk and think about art. If canons are sometimes worth resisting or challenging, it’s because the canon itself provides a context in which resisting or challenging has meaning. Canons are rigid…but flexibility becomes meaningless if there’s no structure to flex. It takes a small amount of gumption to say that something — whether Dokebi Bride or anything else — should be in the canon. Maybe that’s why it’s worth saying in the first place.

Nowhere Man, Somewhere Dragon

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In this post a few days ago I compared these two pictures:

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That first, with the dragon, is from Dokebi Bride, a Korean manwha by a young creator named Marley. The second image is from All Star Superman, drawn by Frank Quitely, one of the most respected mainstream illustrators currently working.

As I said in the previous post, both of these images are meant to be awe-inspiring, or viscerally impressive. And as I also said, Marley’s drawing really impressed me, while Quitely’s didn’t as much (I don’t hate it; I just don’t love it either.)

Anyway, I was thinking a bit more about these two images, and it struck me just how almost iconically west vs. east they are. In the first place, of course, Superman’s a Western symbol, and the oriental dragon is an Eastern one. More than that, though, is the way these two symbols work, and how they’re integrated into the stories.

Superman in general, and in this image in particular, is about individual triumph and modernity — individual triumph *as* modernity in some ways. (See Tom’s essay here for his take on this. Quiteley’s image, with its retro-modernist vibe and workers-of-the-world referencing, is positioning Superman as savior and worker — as salvation through work, you could even argue. It’s the apotheosis (pretty much literally) of sacrifice figured as massive effort — man puffed up through sheer sweat and muscle to take his seat at the helm of the universe.

(There’s a socialist/constructivist tinge to the design as well too, referencing Siegel’s design sense and the character’s initial quasi-socialism (beating up mine owners and the like. It’s kind of an interesting reminder that capitalism and socialism are *both* modernist and *both* puritan; both fetishize effort and progress in very similar ways. They’re more different inflections of the same idea than they are true opposites.)

Okay, where was I?

Oh right. So the point is that Quiteley’s image is about the bittersweet triumph over adversity; man attaining Godhead through superforce and sacrifice; an effortful Christ. The awe or reverence is the glow of triumph (though laced with some melancholy, since Supes has to keep the sun going forever, more or less.)

In Dokebi Bride, on the other hand, the awe has a very different inflection. Obviously, the dragon isn’t human, and, indeed, it dwarfs the woman in the frame. The point here is not mastery over nature (Superman controlling the sun through work) but the untameability of nature. The summoner here is actually a nascent capitalist; she wants to gain individual glory through demonstrating her summoning skills, and/or just through putting on a good show. The dragon is not amused:

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This isn’t to say that the dragon is evil, or necessarily inimical to human beings; on the contrary, he has a close, even loving friendship with the the main character’s grandmother, who is the village shaman. Nor is the dragon all powerful; in fact, he’s weak and tired and old. But even an old dragon is a lot bigger than you and your dreams of glory, and fucking with him is a really bad idea.

It’s also interesting, I think, how nostalgia is worked through in these images. Both are definitely nostalgic; Quiteley’s is nostalgic for a more innocent modernism — a moment when progress to a super-future seemed possible. Marley’s is nostalgic for a rural Korean past and mythology; a countryside and a spirituality that are dying out. Both reference these nostalgias thematically (it’s what they’re about) and through their art styles; in Quiteley’s case, by reference back to the art nouveau/constructivist milieu of Siegel (and Winsor McCay, I think); in Marley’s, to innumerable examples of traditional art and printmaking.

The way the nostalgia works, though, is pretty different. Quiteley’s nostalgia, is, I would argue, kind of adrift. For all the talk about Superman-as-myth, the truth is he’s not Christ; his roots in our culture go back only 70 or 80 years, and he doesn’t actually stand for anything in particular except hitting bad guys and being kind of entertaining. Nostalgia for Superman isn’t really nostalgia for any big idea so much as nostalgia for a favorite toy…and, indeed, Quiteley’s image could almost be a toy box, or a figurine. Superman seems packaged, a commodity fetish, which points to its own possession (or the loss of its possession in a nostalgic past.). The drawing is deliberately set nowhere, in a kind of suffused emptiness; it’s an eternal frozen moment of nostalgia for one’s own wonderfulness, that goes nowhere and comes from nowhere.

Marley’s drawing, on the other hand, is a nostalgia for a particular place and a particular time. It is *this* fishing village in Korea that her grandmother is tied to (literally; she is possessed by a spirit that won’t let her leave.) The dragon is powerful, but it only rises *here*. For there to be wonder, there has to be a particular landscape, a particular time. The way the earth moves can’t surprise you if you’re able to fly off and turn it yourself.

The point here is that super-hero comics very rarely have a strong sense of wonder. With all the spectacular feats, you’d think they would — but somehow they all end up as tricks; they’re fun and goofy, or I guess more recently bloody, but they don’t actually inspire awe. And I think it’s because of something Tom said, “Superman keeps the universe our size.” Super-heroes are there to make things more manageable. Awe — a sense of vastness, of human insignificance or vulnerability — is antagonistic to everything they stand for. If Superman saw that dragon, he wouldn’t be scared or impressed — he’d just punch it in the snout. (As Wonder Woman did in a similar situation..) There’d be big explosions! There’d be excitement! There’d be action! But there wouldn’t be a moment where you said, “oh my god,” and felt rooted to one particular spot, and overwhelmed.