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Published on August 18, 2007

Parents and educators are often heard fretting over youngsters' fondness for comic books, but that's where lots of Thai kids have found out more about Africa than their parents know, or even learned how to handle an earthquake if one occurs.

Thank, for one, best-selling cartoonist Hong Jae-Cheol, who's sold more than five million comic books in his native South Korea and whose work is routinely translated into Thai, Mandarin and English.

Nanmee Books serves up his adventure series as "Rod Tai…." ("Surviving an…."), with the nine books collectively having sold 300,000 copies to date.

Influenced by Japanese comics of the 1970s that gave youngsters more serious, educational content, Jae-Cheol says he and his compatriots have made the idea "more fun".

The former biology student shares his love of science in lively comics like "Surviving the Cave" and "Surviving the Insect World", in which a family or a group of friends encounters the dangerous forces of nature. Readers learn about different animal species and natural phenomena and discover what to do in different situations.

Matichon Publishing once released the Japanese comic book "Hadashi no Gen" ("Barefoot Gen"), written by Keiji Nakazawa in 1973, about a six-year-old boy who lived through the Hiroshima nuclear blast. It was serious stuff for kids. Jae-Cheol tries to maintain a higher entertainment ratio, with plenty of humour piled into the cute illustrations. Imagination plays as big a role as reality.

He and his team - Lee Tae-Ho and Mun Jung-Hoo - put a lot of research into the stories. They carefully study the animal species and build and take apart models. "Surviving the Cave" was already a completed storyboard before they figured they'd better actually visit a cave themselves, and sure enough, the illustrations changed dramatically.

"The books are one part imagination and one part reality - if the kids really want to survive they have to use their imagination too!" Jae-Cheol says.

Having banked a bundle from the comics' sales, he plans to travel more and harvest fresh ideas for future adventure tales, starting with ancient Egypt.

Educational comic books have become so popular in South Korea, he says, that children now have 300 to 400 to choose from.

Another cartoonist who's doing well is Won-Bok-Rhie, whose series of witty comic books on the countries of Europe - "Far Country, Neighbour Country" - has sold 12 million copies. He lived in Germany for 10 years while studying Western philosophy.

He's also done a comic book called "Korea Unmasked", about his country's culture, people and relations with China and Japan, which has also been immensely popular.

But another of Bok-Rhie's projects fell foul of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the Jewish human-rights organisation, which accused him of anti-Semitism for suggesting there was an undue Jewish influence on the US news media. Bok-Rhie apologised.

To be sure, comic books can sometimes be as serious as they seem deceptively innocent.

Lisnaree Vichitsorasatra

The Nation