Abstract

This paper was written to investigate the narrative traits of Lee Ae-rim’s Comic Books. Lee Ae-rim arrived on the scene with the boom of comic book magazines in the 1990s. Although she started her career as a Comic Book writer, she expanded her own area gradually and has been working actively as an animation director as well. The superficial characteristics of Lee Ae-rim’s works can be summed up as sexuality, grotesqueness, and fantasy. In other words, Lee Ae-rim’s comic books are mainly characterized by the visualization of sexual, grotesque, and fantastic shapes. Lee Ae-rim has faced challenges with her own overwhelming and compelling images like no one else. For that reason, it is true that people haven’t paid careful attention to the hidden stories behind her pictures. This paper considers that looking back on the narratives that Lee Ae-rim has been interested in, from early days to recent days, that is to say, the contexts of stories, is a shortcut to reveal a point of contact between her past, present, and future. Especially, this paper focused on the properties of the circulated and repeated stories, the stories ruled by fate and coincidence, and the stories in which elements of fantasy encounter an attempt of violation. As a result, it was found that the narratives of Lee Ae-rim’s comic books demand us to face suppressed desires in a new way, by wrapping up the most fundamental aspects of human being in universality and constancy with specificity and grotesqueness. The reason why Lee Ae-rim has continued the avant-garde and omnidirectional works thus far explains what our society suppresses, inversely. Moreover, the narratives of Lee Ae-rim are significant, by being devoted to the right function of art not only to disclose suppressed desires but to satisfy them. Making an in-depth investigation of the narratives of Lee Ae-rim’s comic books in various contexts, this research is intended to establish a diversity of Korean comic books, by adding meaning to the creative values of individual writers.