Transmission of Meaning through Comics: Korean Graphic Novels Portraying the Korean War

This paper analyses Geonung Park’s Geu yeoreumnarui gieok (Memories of Those Summer Days), published in 2019, and Kim Geumsuk’s Gidarim (The Waiting), published in 2020, two Korean graphic novels that portray the Korean War (1950–1953). The aim of the paper is to show the manner in which meaning is conveyed in comics. Park’s graphic novel focuses on a largely unknown event from the Korean War, which is the Nogeunri massacre (26–29 July 1950), when American soldiers killed hundreds of South Korean civilian refugees, while Kim’s graphic novel focuses more on the memory and the aftermath of the Inter-Korean War, when families were able to reunite, 70 years after the conflict. The first graphic novel can only be found in Korean, whereas Kim’s novel has beentranslated into English, a year after its publication, but the object of analysis is the original, Korean version. This paper discusses the two graphic novels through an interdisciplinary approach, from the perspective of trauma and memory studies, with a focus on the concept of “cultural trauma,” theorized by Jeffrey C. Alexander, as well as through a semiotic approach, focusing on the concepts of “denotation” and “connotation,” as discussed by Roland Barthes, in order to portray the means through which a hybrid medium, such as comics, combines cultural, visual, and textual aspects to create meaning.