The naked tree

Gendry-Kim and Hong are three-for-three in gifting English-reading audiences another sensational author/translator collaboration illuminating a small window into Korean history after Grass (2019) and The Waiting (2021). Gendry-Kim's starkly black-and-white, dynamic panels open with a framing prologue in which a couple discovers the 1969 newspaper announcement of an artist's death, prompting the wife to "carefully . . . coax out the story [she]'d long kept buried in [her] heart." The year is 1951, and the U.S. military occupies Seoul as the Korean Peninsula is cleaving in two. Lee Kyeonga is 20 that fall, working in the American PX building selling portraits hand-painted onto silk scarves--mostly to GIs (lonely and arrogant both). Before the war, Kyeonga was an English literature student at unparalleled Ewha Womans University; her near-fluency now enables her to be the conduit between demanding customers and not-so-fine artists. When a reticent, accomplished painter joins the team, Kyeonga becomes enamored with him even as she realizes he has a wife and young children. Her longing becomes an escape, especially from a troubled past haunted by devastating tragedy and loss. Gendry-Kim's emotional author's note at story's end reveals that she's adapted (and deviated slightly) from the original novel of the same name by the late Park Wan-suh, one of Korea's leading historical writers. Gendry-Kim's work, as always, remains uniquely her own--immersive, potent, enduring.

This adaptation by Eisner Award winner Gendry-Kim (The Waiting) of a seminal Korean novel by Park Wan-Suh possesses a rare power. Twenty-year-old Lee Kyeonga navigates 1950s Seoul, which is under siege by the North Korean army. Cynical and guarded, she lives with her mother and works at the Post Exchange, where she butters up American GIs so they'll buy portraits of themselves painted on handkerchiefs. Gendry-Kim breathes life into this milieu in just a handful of striking panels, as Kyeonga convinces a vain saleswoman to write love letters in English to her American beau, develops an uncomfortable crush on a married portrait painter, and reels from an encounter with a GI who promises to "liberate" her in his hotel room. These fraught episodic vignettes are weighted by Kyeonga's desperation to free herself from guilt and grief over the deaths of her two brothers in a bombing. "How could the Gods be so cruel?" Kyeonga recalls her mother crying out, "How could they take both my boys and leave only the girl behind?" Gendry-Kim brings this trauma full-force to her pages in bold, brushy inkwork, proving yet again that she's an essential voice in global comics. It's a masterful and devastating portrait of the lasting cruelties of wartime. Agent: Nicolas Grivel, Nicolas Grivel Agency. (Aug.)