Editor's Introduction

By fate positions 28.4 went to production just as the United States was recognizing—as if for the first time—that COVID-19 lives in human hosts passing the illness around. Just by circumstance, scholarly essays here showcase other intellectuals serving in desperate times. We Jung Yi's "Redrawing the Division Lines? Surplus, Connectivity, and Remediation in the South Korean Webtoon Secretly, Greatly" takes up the webtoon, a genre founded in Korea and now widespread globally. The drama is complex, mutant, involving secret agents, double natures, absurdity, the thirty-eighth parallel, political hate and its inverse and is, Yi argues, generically speaking a co-mix; what used to be called "hybrid." The essay shows the way Secretly, Greatly makes its characters interact, but Yi particularly focuses on explaining narrative, the society of the characters, in relation to the genre. Webtoons more than other mass mediated forms pull social elements into an activity Yi calls "digital reticulation," which in Yi's critical community means "retrieving knowledge and memory" from one time/place and putting them into another. Digital reticulation (messing with temporality and individual memory) generates neoliberal value in the usual online fashion, with hits and ads, but, and this is Yi's central point, it also makes possible "cyber-publics," where consuming youth can "express and circulate their emotions and demands through alternative channels beyond mainstream broadcasting." Like the soaps, there are plots generating cause and effect, but in webtoons something else is going on. As "the multitude," that is, participant viewers, go online and volunteer themselves in the digital environment, they are exploited for surplus but allowed passively to participate in alternative mediascapes.

Noting carefully how these consumers are not so much "subversive as subservient to the established system" (my emphasis), Yi insists that subservience does not rule out political engagement. Remediation and mediatization in her view are instigations, particularly in Secretly, Greatly, which zooms the past into the present and the future. Consuming this webtoon, the online player joins albeit passively the game of digital reticulation and history writing. The essay ends on this point. Because it is a webtoon and tactile in a whole new way, yet emotional in the way manga and cartoons are, can users, viewers, make a "virtual crossing of the uncrossable," meaning when Korea's political division becomes the intensity in the webtoon story, which is all about secret spies, is it likely or possible even in a passive relation to consumption for players to "forge a different type of connection with the unseen others living beyond the thirty-eighth parallel?" It is Yi's contribution that the question posed is answered in a both/and, the yes and no, since ambivalence means the consumer will be pressed by virtue of reading to think more, to make what Yi calls "surplus thinking about division and mediation in both aesthetic and political senses."

Ben Whaley's essay "When Anne Frank Met Astro Boy: Drawing the Holocaust through Manga" analyzes predigital, pervasive educational manga, but he also considers the issue that Yi calls "reticulation," which in Whaley's analysis resembles a politics of universalization. Whaley expands earlier critical insight into how Anne Frank helped to erase Japanese military atrocities, and he also sets aside previous criticism that established Anne Frank's de-Judification. Whaley's essay folds in the iconic vision to focus on how the Anne Frank deification muddles up conventional sex-binaried manga in which boys consume violence and girls consume interiority, arguing that educational Anne Frank manga spliced these together.

What Whaley calls the "genre hallmarks" of shōjo (girls') manga culture are reworked—the Anne icon presents a universally recognizable story about a heroic girl's "exuberant life and untimely death" neatly integrated into a local motif in that particular subgenre of historical spectacularizing "the grief for those who perished in times of upheaval and transition." As it turns out, this allows the Anne icon to become a Virgin Mary or a bodhisattva character after a sentimental deathbed scene. However, uncharacteristically, the Anne Frank manga rains down physical brutality on the enemy, turning away from Anne's interior feelings...