That Beautiful Child: Kids Are All Right

Welcome back to ANIWIRE! Today we’re talking about Kids Are All Right, a Korean comic strip you can read on Webtoon right now. Before that, though, here’s some recent news in the anime and manga world.

News

• The winter anime season is in full swing. My recommendations would be Delicious in Dungeon (for general audiences,) A Sign of Affection (for romance fans) and Bang Brave Bravern! (for robot enjoyers and thrill seekers.)
• Crunchyroll is set to release a documentary about the history of the famed Studio Bones titled BONES 25: DREAMING FORWARD. The first episode will premiere on February 13th, 2024. 
• Translator Cardogin and programmer EsperKnight released a translation of Linda³ Again, a weird and deeply fascinating Playstation RPG. I recommend checking out this interview with the translators at Wes Fenlon’s newsletter Read Only Memo.
• A new trailer was released for upcoming spring anime series Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. This is definitely the show I’m most excited for this year, although I’m biased towards original projects.
• Viz is printing new omnibus editions of Chie Shinohara’s classic time travel “romantasy” Red River. They’re also localizing Sumi Eno’s After God, a series I’ve heard compared favorably to Chainsaw Man.

Bookmarks

• Joe Sacco is back drawing weekly comics about Gaza for The Comics Journal.
• For Pitchfork, Shy Thompson reviewed Joe Hisashi’s excellent score for The Boy and the Heron.
• Mr. Bowers published a video about the rather unconventional rock idol anime series, BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! If you enjoyed Bocchi the Rock! but want something with a little more bite, this is the show for you.
• Amelie Doree continues to profile weird and fascinating visual novels, including Suisenka and Manakashi no Yuri wa Akaku Somaru. (These games explore adult topics, so I reckon they aren’t safe for work. Use your discretion.)
• For Anime Herald, Borealis Capps wrote about Otaku-chans, a series of anime shorts airing on TikTok.

AMV of the Week

Here’s “The Water is Wide” by Prostrate Constantly. 

There are a few different ways to write stories for children. One is to put yourself in the shoes of the child and imagine what matters to them. Every child is different, and every generation has its own interests and fears. Woe to the adult writer that must keep up with the new technologies and hobbies kids navigate every day. That said, some adults are perfectly capable of writing stories for kids that take their dreams seriously. The best of these capture a time and a state of mind that many adults forget for better or worse.

There is another way, though, and that is to lean all the way into the gulf between the adult and the child. These kinds of stories play upon how the inner lives of children are affected by the complex world that surrounds them. An excellent example is Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer, a comic about a teenage girl’s beach vacation. While she’s the focal character, her parents and neighbors are just as important to the story. Understanding the book means reading between the lines for what the heroine is missing, and what she’s scared to acknowledge.

Most Korean comics published on the Webtoon platform take the former approach rather than the latter. They are wish fulfillment fantasies for children and young adults. This is perfectly fine, but it does raise the question of what an alternative might look like. One such alternative is HP56’s 2013 comic Kids Are All Right. It’s a slice of life series told from the perspective of Dai, a grade schooler who lives in South Korea. As far as Dai is concerned, he lives a perfectly happy and normal life. It is up to the reader to recognize that his mother is sick and his father is too busy working to spend time with him. 

Kids Are All Right is a simply drawn comic. The art is in black and white with an occasional dash of color. The characters are differentiated by size and hair style. Every face has two little dots for eyes and a line for a mouth if they have something to say. HP56’s style is a world removed from the elaborate designs and colors of contemporary Webtoons. Even comic strips like Peanuts are more detailed. You have to go back to early webcomics like 1/0 to find something comparable.

Where HP56’s art succeeds is that it puts the reader in Dai’s shoes. Dai is smart for his age but still has plenty to learn. Much that is obvious to the reader goes over his head. In that respect, the rough character designs and lack of detail make perfect sense. The reader perceives Dai’s world in the same way that he does, as a big white space of circles and lines. It conjures a sense of nostalgia for “a simpler time.”

Dai does not live in a simple world, though. The dialogue of Kids Are All Right can be cruel and unsparing. Teachers don’t take the concerns of their students seriously. Parents judge kids like Dai for being poor, and tell their kids not to fraternize with children from lower classes. In a memorable early scene, Dai hears his classmates complain behind his back about his bad breath. When he talks to his mother about it, she wonders if Dai’s breath is due to his lack of nutrition. “I’m sorry, Dai,” she says, crying in her hospital bed.

Kids Are All Right isn’t a particularly judgmental comic. Its characters rarely fit typical Webtoon archetypes like “bully,” “shy girl” or “romantic lead.” Dai’s friend Minho has a delinquent brother who is kind to Dai but cruel to others. Another child is frequently bullied in class; Dai lets him hold the school’s pet rabbit, but he drops and kills the rabbit by accident when the rabbit bites him. Later, when the bullied child moves out of the neighborhood, he’s confused when Dai offers solace. “Do you even know my name?” he asks. “Stop pretending to be nice and just go.”

Dai’s classmates are similarly tough to pin down. His wealthy classmate Sia develops a crush on him early, so you’d expect the two of them would spend time together later. Instead Dai befriends another female classmate Ari, who enjoys writing poetry. Sia is shunted away. Another character, An-Gyeong, is introduced as a child prodigy managed by helicopter parents. Another story might engineer conflict between his constant studying and Dai’s innate curiosity. HP56, though, keeps An-Gyeong and Dai apart from one another.

Instead, An-Gyeong is brought into conflict with Sia. Sia is in charge of the class hamsters, which An-Gyeong watches every day. An-Gyeong is convinced that Sia is making a mistake by putting hamsters together in the same cage. When the hamsters have babies, he scrambles to stop the other kids in class from touching them. Of course, by the next day, the mother hamster ate her young. “This happened because you didn’t listen to me!” An-Gyeong shouts at Sia.

As his teacher says, though, An-Gyeong was both right and wrong. Even though he wanted to protect the hamsters, he couldn’t recognize that Sia was just as devastated by their death as he was. “Most fights start because people don’t understand each other,” his teacher says. Adults have a tough time learning that lesson. Kids, though, are receptive. An-Gyeong and Sia are able to forgive one another. That’s one reason why the comic is called Kids Are All Right.

The crux of the drama is Dai’s parents. At first the reader is led to sympathize with Dai’s mother and despise Dai’s father. After all, we initially only ever see Dai’s father sleeping at home or watching TV. It isn’t until later that the whole story comes out: that Dai’s father came back to marry his mother after she was sexually assaulted by a coworker. He works hard to support his family, while she raises the kid even though she despises the man who could be Dai’s real father.

Dai’s mother and father do not get along. Perhaps if she was not constantly in the hospital, and he was not always working, they would divorce. But when Dai’s father quits his day job and starts spending more time with his son, the reader understands (even if Dai does not) that his dad is preparing for the day when Dai’s mom won’t be around. Dai’s parents clearly care a lot about him even if they can’t stand each other.

Kids Are All Right is all about these subtle changes over time. Dai’s friends move away so he makes new ones. His father picks up the slack as his mother grows weak. Our understanding of Dai’s place in the world changes as he grows older. I imagine the series would have made a great weekly read, in the same vein as classic newspaper comics like For Better Or Worse. In its current form, reading all 55 chapters in one day is like eating a sugar pill that dissolves into bitter medicine.

HP56 is a prolific author whose other work includes Middle School Girl A and Push-Off. To this point, only Kids Are All Right has been translated into English by Webtoon. (Fan translators have made attempts at Middle School A and Push-Off, but neither is complete.) The comic reads like a work from a very different time in the company’s history, when artists were making their own rules and formulas in real time. It’s tough to say if HP56 was writing for an audience Dai’s age, or for his desperate parents. That said, I’ll end with a line from Dai’s mom, which I think anybody of any age could learn from:

“Far worse than the physical pain that ravaged my body daily was the crushing sadness that I only ever got to hold that beautiful child a handful of times in my life.”