Best New K-Comics to Read in May

Welcome back to our rundown of the best, or at least most interesting, K-Comics released in a given month! April didn't happen because of the Spring K-Comics Guide, but everything's back on track for May with a variety of stories to enjoy. From Austen-inspired to zombies, there's a lot to read across the platforms Manta, Lezhin, WEBTOON, and Tapas as May flowers bloom even online.

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If You're Looking for a Regency Romance: Miss Pendleton

If I have a recent literary pet peeve beyond the word “romantasy,” it's the ad copy that acts like Regency, or historical, romance didn't exist before Netflix adapted Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels. (Georgette Heyer, who started publishing Regencies in 1935, would like a word.) Strictly speaking, Miss Pendleton (adapted from the novel by Yu Hyemin by kkomak) isn't really a Regency, despite the bizarre fact that all of the ballgowns are in the Empire (waistline under the breasts) style – slang and references to the works of Alexandre Dumas, as well as daytime women's clothing, all indicate the 1870s. However, the story and writing are peak Regency, filled with characters who would be right at home in Jane Austen's works and plot points that are pure Heyer or Mary Balogh. Miss Laura Pendleton, the heroine, is, at age twenty-five, very close to being “on the shelf,” a mildly pejorative way of saying she's still single. She's made a brilliant career as a matchmaker, however, so when Mr. William Fairfax asks her to “chaperone” his cousin Mr. Ian Dalton, a dedicated bachelor with a penchant for offending women, it's understood that she'll find him a wife. Except, in the best romance fashion, the woman who Ian is most drawn to is Laura herself.

Ian and William have a wonderful Darcy/Bingley energy to their friendship, and Ian's abrasive qualities are very similar to some of Mr. Darcy's as well. Laura's work as a matchmaker may put some readers in mind of a less obnoxious Emma. (Jane Austen herself wasn't fond of Emma, at least apocryphally.) Meanwhile, Laura's friend Miss Jane Hyde is a slightly more modern character, at least in genre terms; she has zero desire to marry, even though her family desperately needs – or desperately think they need – her to wed for money. Her suitor is none other than William, and while he appears fine with her rejection, I have my doubts. Major props go to both WEBTOON's uncredited translator and kkomak for setting the scene for this series so beautifully – yes, the costumes span about fifty years of history, but they're lovely, and backgrounds are similarly well drawn. The language is old-fashioned yet readable. This is simply a treat for fans of western historical romances. And that's really what it is – set in England, grounded in a recognizable version of reality, and lacking in the fussiness that can sometimes accompany fantasy romances in manhwa. It is a must for genre fans…and yes, that includes people who enjoy Bridgerton.

If You're Looking for a Second Chance (BL) Romance: Seven Sundays

Firefighters, a colleague recently remarked to me, are universal sex symbols, and Charyeok's Seven Sundays understands that. One of Lezhin's many explicit BL titles, this is what's known to romance readers as a “second chance romance,” meaning that the characters were a couple before and broke up. But the feelings remained nonetheless, and now, eight years later, Taeyong Kang and Jiwan Han are abruptly reunited…and it may not be entirely a coincidence. Although Jiwan ghosted Taeyong back in the day – an even meaner thing to do when you consider that they've known each other since childhood – there's a very good chance that he's the reason why a major TV network wants to do a documentary on Taeyong's firefighting career. Sure, Taeyong just had a flashy televised rescue mission involving him jumping from the window of a burning department store with a lost child, but it's not mere chance that the first network to reach out is the one Jiwan's a producer for. That's the entire reason camera-shy Taeyong agrees to the filming, so when Jiwan tries to disguise himself inside a T-rex costume, he's not sure what's going on. And when he discovers that Jiwan has a seven-year-old son named Taeyong, he's even more confused.

The old flames are burning hot in this series, which is certainly part of the draw for some readers. Also a major component is Jiwan's son. Even if this wasn't the first time I've seen a pregnancy surrogate turn up in manhwa or manga, little Taeyong is an important character. He knows his dad's gay, he's keenly aware of that not being accepted by Korean society, and his key concern is that Jiwan dates someone who will be kind to him…and not see his son as an annoyance. Like most kids, little Taeyong sees and hears a whole lot more than adults give him credit for, and he knows that his babysitter, Namhun Seo, is just watching him to get in good with his dad. But adult Taeyong talks to him like a person and makes it clear that he wants to be part of both of their lives, as a package deal. Even though the first six chapters don't spend too much time on that, it means the world to the little boy. The problem now is getting Jiwan fully onboard with Taeyong being back in his life as his partner.

The art isn't amazing here, and unlike many of Lezhin's titles, it's censored with light stick penises. But the writing largely makes up for that. The idea that Taeyong isn't put off by the presence of a child in Jiwan's life is shown as important. This has a lot of potential to be not just a romance, but a story about building a family, and that's very appealing.

If You're Looking for the Zombie Apocalypse: Stay Alive

What if the zombie apocalypse started in a conspiracy of silence? That's what happens in Stay Alive, adapted by GONU and Foxy from the novel by Halloween. Shinu Lee is a former special forces soldier who has just started a job as the bodyguard for Taebaek Lee, the stepson of a powerful conglomerate CEO suffering from a mysterious (and possibly fake?) disease when he begins to notice that reality and the news aren't lining up. He first is clued in by a news report about a military helicopter that crashed in the mountains: the news says it was “engine failure,” but Shinu sees bullet holes on the aircraft. A few days later, he receives a phone call from his former general, telling him to get back to Incheon from Seoul posthaste for reasons he won't, or can't, disclose. Loyal to the job, Shinu refuses, and soon thereafter he and Taebaek see a zombie attacking a person. They rush back to Taebaek's apartment and barricade themselves inside, but oddly enough, the news isn't reporting on the zombies. There's a concerted effort by the media not to reveal the truth, and that's just as dangerous as the undead roaming Gangnam.

Stay Alive's take on zombies is interesting, a blend of traditional and creative. The infection is still spread via bites, as the men learn when they allow Taebaek's housekeeper to come in with a suspicious wound on her ankle, but the zombies' jaws are dislocated and their mouths are full of sharp, shark-like teeth. Like in School-Live!, it takes a while for infection to set in, and then the zombies become ravening beasts; Taebaek remarks that it looks like his living room has been chewed up by a rabid horde of teething puppies.

The first eight chapters don't go too far into the details about this outbreak, which we know began with a soldier on that downed helicopter, instead focusing on how Shinu is trying to keep Taebaek alive. There'll almost certainly be a BL component to this later (it is on Manta, after all), but I think fans of zombie horror will still find this story engrossing. The lore and character development are being doled out at the right pace to keep things interesting and intriguing, the art is good, and the zombies are some of the scarier ones I've seen, something enhanced by the use of blacks and reds in the backgrounds. Stay Alive is good horror, all the more so because it keeps its cards close to its vest.

If You're Looking for Women Loving Women Who Are Also Gangsters: Falling

“Unless I'm about to die, I'm your bitch.” For the ladies of Manta's Falling, adapted by DOG and Eunsu from the novel by Gyechasooyeul, that's saying a lot. Seungji and Yeongwon are gangsters, selling smuggled cigarettes for the mob Yeongwon's family runs. Seungji is looking to get out of the life, and out of Busan, when her friend (possibly her girlfriend or her ex) suggests she join Yeongwon's group, especially since Seungji has just gotten badly burned by a different illegal organization. Although it's not what she really wants to do, Seungji agrees, and she quickly finds herself chaperoning Yeongwon around Busan as she brings sellers the goods. To Seungji's eyes, Yeongwon is dangerously naïve; something not disproven by discovering that after Seungji mentioned liking a drink called sikhye, Yeongwon had caseloads of it delivered to the office for her. The actions of a hardened mobster this is not.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that both women see something in each other that they feel they lack in themselves. Seungji has been in this line of work for a long, long time, and in her eyes, she lacks the sweet naivety that Yeongwon embodies. Yeongwon, on the other hand, doesn't see that she has much to offer anyone, much less a hardened criminal organization. Seungji's toughness and gruff kindness speak to her, both in an aspirational way and because the other woman treats her like a person, not a doll to be protected or a failure who's too sweet for the world she was born into. Yeongwon does her best to be worthy of Seungji's devotion (as she sees it), using her leverage as the boss' niece to make Seungji stop smoking, buying her supplements, and generally doing her damnedest to look after Seungji. It feels like there's a miscommunication, but Seungji isn't sure how to deal with that…and if she's honest, she probably doesn't want it to stop. Both women are out of their depth, and watching them flounder towards each other and possibly out of the business is rewarding and worrying – because in a story like this one, there's no guarantee that this story will end with them living happily ever after.

Falling feels different from most of the yuri manga (and manhwa) we get translated into English, and that alone makes it worth checking out. But it's also good in its own right, and the hope of a better ending than we might expect is more than enough to sustain readers.

If You're Looking for a Fractured Fairy Tale: To Take a Mermaid's Heart

I don't know about you, but I've never liked Hans Christian Andersen's original literary fairy tale The Little Mermaid. The poor mermaid gets a very raw deal unless you buy into the form of 19th-century Christianity Andersen was selling. Author Unicorn also has some issues with the tale, because their series To Take a Mermaid's Heart, drawn by Meh and available on Tapas, sets out to revise Andersen's story. In Unicorn's version, the mermaid princess is Cordelia, the daughter of a mermaid mother and a human father. Thanks to an on-again, off-again war between merfolk (called Marmarc in the WEBTOON) and humans, Cordelia has spent the last ten years of her life as a hostage. She lives in the so-called “central villa,” better known to palace denizens as the “birdcage” for the fact that it's a house and grounds surrounded by a wall at the center of the palace complex. Cordelia hasn't left the villa since she arrived at age eight, and if the crown prince, Noah, didn't defy his father Tobias to sneak in, she'd only ever interact with her lady-in-waiting Melina and three maids. Unbelievably things get even worse on her eighteenth birthday, though: Tobias arrives in the early hours of the morning and stabs her before cutting out her heart.

Fortunately for Cordelia and the story, her mother anticipated these events, or something like them. Before she sent her child to the humans, she gave Cordelia a ring, telling her to break the jewel in it if she was ever in danger. In her dying moments, Cordelia does just that, and she's catapulted two years back in time. Armed with the knowledge that Tobias has been faking his kindness and affection, she's ready to avert her cruel fate, knowing this means that it's hard for her to trust anyone. Melina works for Tobias. Noah is his son. Could they also have been pretending friendship? These first eight chapters never give us a firm answer, keeping readers in suspense as Cordelia tries to find a way out of the future that's waiting for her.

Unicorn does a good job of creating both doubt and reasons to second guess everyone's motivations. Noah feels rejected by his father and burdened by society's expectations of him as a boy; he'd rather bake and wear floral prints than learn swordcraft and dress in dark, masculine tones. Cordelia and Melina are the only people who appreciate that. Melina, meanwhile, wanted to become a knight, and before his untimely death, her father had planned to allow just that and to make her, and not her younger brother Bill, his heir. His death stopped that, but Melina has been carrying that pain around for ten years, and a piece of her knows that she was sent to be Cordelia's maid to get her out of the way. Everyone's got their own reasons that could either work together or become selfish motives that will damn them all. To Take a Mermaid's Heart is a much more complex story than the one it's fracturing – and each broken shard of the original may well be used as a weapon in this new tale of a mermaid fighting against an Andersenian fate.

If You're Looking for Action Adventure: For My Own Good

By now we've all gotten very used to the Solo Leveling-style dungeon story, to the point where there's a real risk of them getting stale. But Saram and Son, Studio Dam's adaptation of milleum's For My Own Good (available on Manta) shows that there's still life in the genre if you make it your own. For My Own Good's title alone says a fair amount: protagonist Heejae Woo begins the series as a remarkably selfish person. Rescued from a lab at age ten, he immediately figures out the best way to get his captors in trouble (he tells his rescuer that his name is “Number 12”), and from there he grows up to be the sort of boss you'd hate to work for. As a member of the management team that organizes dungeon raids and hunters, Heejae is just in it for the easy living, even going so far as to foolishly ignore the misgivings of Jieun, a hunter he's known since they were kids. That turns out to be his last mistake, because the dungeon she warns him about sparks an international disaster, leaving Heejae the sole surviving human on the planet. When a monster drops a strange device that asks if it should “activate” since the world is extinct, he says yes…and wakes up twenty years in the past.

Unlike most other similar series, Heejae doesn't regress physically. He's still his thirty-year-old self, which may mean there's a kid version of him in this world. He's just been plopped down in the past at a moment when people are slated to die – and to his credit, he immediately begins making it so that they won't. The interesting thing about this story is that Heejae is unaware of his own redemption arc. When he finds himself in a situation he's read about, when civilians and hunter students are killed, he simply finds a solution. He settles into teacher mode without even realizing that he's doing it, teaching the kids how to survive in a clear, concise manner while also planning out how he'll help using his skills and knowledge. He's still framing things to himself as a matter of putting himself first, but it's not hard to see how that's going to end up going by the wayside, even if he's not aware he does it. While Heejae thinks he's working for his own good in the selfish sense, what he's doing is making himself a good (or better) person.

It's all much less preachy than it sounds, and the action is consistent, both in terms of physical fights and the internal action inside Heejae's head. It's a good take on the urban dungeon drama.

If You're Looking for That Classic Shoujo Feel: Ugly Duckling Complex

Let's end where we began – with a romance manhwa on WEBTOON. But instead of a historical, Ugly Duckling Complex, adapted by JAMOND and Sayosae from the novel by EUNWOO, is a high school-set contemporary with serious shoujo vibes. Taking its cues from classics of the genre in both manga and YA novel forms, the story follows the unlikely romance between super hot guy Junu and everygirl Ajin. Ajin wears glasses and has braces, and while she's definitely not unpopular, she's also just decidedly average. Baking is her joy in life, but she loves hanging out with her so-called bestie Chohui, too…and Chohui doesn't deserve someone as nice as Ajin.

That's something Junu figures out much faster than Ajin does. The two are in the same class but talk for the first time when Ajin is playing guard dog for Chohui, who has accepted a date request from a guy at school she's not sure of. Ironically, while Chohui's talking to the guy, Ajin is accosted by a creeper, and Junu saves her. Tellingly, when Chohui notices, it's not Ajin she's worried about – she's excited to get in with Junu. She carefully inserts herself between them every chance she gets, and Junu very quickly realizes that Chohui is a pretty rotten friend. While he's worried about Ajin, he also genuinely enjoys her company. Ajin just treats him like a person, albeit one she's not sure she wants to be around, and in response, Junu defrosts more than he does with any other girl. Chohui sees what's going on (and hates it), but Ajin's unaware of it and can't figure out what Junu's deal is. It doesn't seem to be that she has low self-esteem, but more that the possibility of Junu liking her is so far off her radar that it doesn't even register. She's more interested in baking better financiers than dating, or so it appears.

Ugly Duckling Complex is off to a good start. Sayosae's art is simple and pretty and if you need a new bad guy to hate, readers in the comments have been comparing Chohui to Rashta from The Remarried Empress, so you know she's garbage. If you've been missing the days of Peach Girl and other similar shoujo, this will fill the void, with the bonus that Junu and Ajin are remarkably adorable, both together and apart.

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And that's it for this month! Be sure to stop by the forums to tell us what K-comics you've discovered this month, whether they're just debuting or not!