Best New K-Comics to Read in June

June is traditionally the month of blushing brides, but that's not the case in the WEBTOON sphere – for some reason, there's a plethora of divorce comics premiering! Aiming for the Alimony, The Dukedom's Men Interfere with the Divorce, Leave Your Divorce to a Professional Lawyer, How to Divorce a Dragon...the wedding bells are emphatically not ringing on Tapas, Manta, and WEBTOON. Fortunately, there's more variety out there if tales of divorcées aren't your thing, so sit back and see if you can find your next summer read in this month's roundup.

As always, this list doesn't include Tappytoon titles, due to a lack of dates or physical releases.

Most reverse harems owe a lot to the villainess isekai genre these days. Trapped at Home with the Male Leads, adapted by chova and ROSAC from the novel by Kim Zia, does things a little differently. Cherry Sinclair has been reborn from our world in a fantasy one, but she was never the villainess – Cherry was a socialite side character in a lowbrow survival horror/romance hybrid, doomed to fall victim to the zombie hordes. She's got no interest in hijacking the story in any way; she just wants to make sure that she survives the coming apocalypse so that heroine Aurora and her bevy of male beauties can go about the plot of the original book. But sadly for Cherry, her efforts to circumvent her fate end up attracting the attention of Aurora's beaux, landing Cherry in a reverse harem with no way out…unless she changes her mind about zombification, of course.

Cherry's story is a delightful mix of the tried-and-true and the mildly unhinged. Cherry herself suffers from the usual pitfall of not quite understanding that those around her are people rather than characters, which means that she utterly fails to realize that acting suspicious will bring the cops around – which means Aurora's adoptive brother Eden, one of the male leads, is hot on Cherry's trail. To say this puts a few crimps in her plan might be understating things, and Cherry's brain isn't entirely ready to function with that level of planning on such sudden notice. She does come off as a smidge TSTL (Too Stupid To Live), but the writing manages to make it clear that this is entirely because of the sudden onset of her past life memories and the adjustment necessary to go from “carefree heiress” to “surviving a zombie apocalypse that's starting any day now.” It's pure entertainment, ably helped along by beautiful art and a pseudo-early 20th-century look to the story's fantasy world. If you like your apocalypses to come with handsome men in forced proximity, head over to Tapas, because this is your story.

Regressor. Possessor. Reincarnator. Those are the Big Three when it comes to modern isekai, and it's Laura Rien's job to help them all if they come to her world. That's the task assigned to the noble Rien (French for “nothing,” and I think it's deliberate) family by the Goddess of Space and Time, with the caveat that only one will appear a century. Only, something's gone wrong – for the past five hundred years, none of the three have shown up at all, and the Rien family is on the verge of ruin. Laura's about ready to give up the manor and her noble status when the crown prince, Dyanth, is poisoned…and then shows up hours later, saying that he was sent by a voice in his dreams. He's a Possessor – what we'd think of as a regular old isekai victim, sent from a Solo Leveling version on South Korea, where he was an S-rank Hunter and college student named Ohn Lee.

But wait! The next day when Laura, having finally gotten a client, goes to RSVP to a nobles' meeting, sees a young man spinning strange magic between his hands while muttering about destroying the kingdom – something she forgets when she gets home and the troublesome son of her neighbors, Sorinte Chares, is waiting in front of her gate, telling her that he was sent to her by a voice in his dreams! Sorinte's a Regressor – someone sent back in time to relive his life and get it right this time. Could that man with the weird magic be a Reincarnator to complete the trifecta? According to the prologue, he certainly is! It's basically Isekaipalooza, and the best part of it (apart from the note-perfect genre send-ups, which are nicely subtle) is that rather than being from the perspectives of the isekai'd, it's from the point of view of the poor woman in charge of helping them out. Laura's just as put-upon as any other isekai character at the whim of a deity, making this at once fresh and familiar. Simply put, it's a hoot.

Both original author Cheong Ahan and adaptor Nokeum understand the assignment, and artist Yeseong does some excellent work with body language, particularly with Sorinte. As usual, Manta's translation is very readable and smooth, and while this skews female-oriented (so many beautiful men), its grasp of its genre makes it an easy recommendation for anyone. The 24-Hour Rebirth Consultation Center is open for business. Do stop in and check it out.

Every school trip I went on felt like an endless loop of horror, but they've got nothing on what Gajun Hae is going through. What at first seems like a perfectly innocent, albeit foolish, mistake, Gajun misses the bus when it leaves from a rest stop on his 11th-grade trip – and so does Sunwoo Baek, the best-known boy at school. But things quickly turn sinister when attempts to reach their teachers are fruitless, something that becomes much clearer when they find the very cell they've been calling in the bushes, covered in blood. When the school's least popular teacher suddenly appears back at the rest stop, the boys are wary…and that turns out to be right on the money. Because when they arrive at the site of the school's “training,” strange, masked figures summon a monster in the name of finding their chosen one, calling everyone else necessary sacrifices. And that's just what they are…until Gajun wakes back up on the bus, Sunwoo beside him. It takes him a few loops to figure out what's going on – every time Sunwoo dies, Gajun is sent back to the past, which indicates that the only real way out of this situation is to save the other boy.

Manta lists this as “BL,” and I could see it going that way eventually. Sunwoo's stated desire to protect Gajun feels like more than just the training he received as someone with strong “special powers,” and Gajun is developing feelings for the other boy as the loops progress. But as of the first seven chapters, this is pure survival horror with a fantasy twist. The world original novelist Dohaeneul created is one where some people have those aforementioned “special powers,” which seem roughly equivalent to psychic phenomena; Sunwoo's is called “obedience,” and he can make anyone do as he says. The powers don't feel strictly necessary. Yes, they make Mr. Park more potentially menacing, but honestly, committing murder (which he almost certainly did) does the trick just as well, and the monsters might be more frightening if they were fantasy intrusions into an otherwise realistic world.

But the real draw here is the time loop – the prologue tells us that Gajun only has twelve loops in which to break the cycle, and it's loop four by the time he figures out that Sunwoo is the key. That's a third of his chances gone, with only the most basic piece of the puzzle figured out…and it's not like saving Sunwoo hasn't been the main focus of his looping before that point. There's a real buildup of urgency here, and MINGNEW's art, with its emphasis on dark spaces and splashes of red, helps convey that. If horror-suspense is what you need to cool down on a hot day, The 11th School Trip is a good choice of reading material.

But what if you want your BL much, much more overt than The 11th School Trip? The answer, as it nearly always is with webtoons, is to turn to Lezhin. Near and Dear, created by 2ple, takes place in the world of Korean showbiz. As a child and a teen, Haeyong was a major star, beginning to act when he was little and eventually transitioning to idol work at age nineteen before everything just…stopped. We don't find out why in these first eight chapters, but he's moved behind the scenes in the film world, something he's not all that thrilled about. He takes steps to hide his identity, but we can see that it's just out of habit – he's not really worried that someone will recognize him.

So, of course, someone does. Yeowoon Jung is the latest hot actor, following the trajectory that Haeyong thought would be his. Haeyong's not bitter about it, more like a little sad, and he's baffled when, at a wrap party, Yeowoon suddenly sits next to him and wants to talk. Unbeknownst to Haeyong, Yeowoon not only recognizes him, he's been looking for him for what sounds like years, and now that he's finally found him, Yeowoon has zero intentions of letting Haeyong go. Not that he says as much; instead, Yeowoon asks Haeyong to be his manager (he's currently without one), and when Haeyong accidentally sees Yeowoon masturbating, well, Yeowoon's not going to let that opportunity pass him by.

That's the major caveat in this story: Yeowoon's not being entirely honest with Haeyong. He manipulates him (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) into a sexual relationship, and while they both enjoy it, it's still the sort of thing that in real life would be the largest of red flags. Fortunately, this is fiction, so what it is instead is a low-key way to have both a mutual relationship and one that dabbles in dubcon at the same time, which can be powerful romance fiction catnip. The plot also acknowledges the way celebrity culture can be unhealthy – one of Yeowoon's old managers was a predatory fan, and he routinely works himself to exhaustion – and that may end up telling us something about why Haeyong ended up leaving the industry. If the dubcon elements don't send you running, this has potential. It's a good blend of story elements, suitably risqué, and with some questions that need to be answered to drive it along.

What does it mean if your father was a serial killer? For Jihyeon Mo, it equals endless suspicion and bullying. Her dad was the worst serial killer South Korea ever saw, and even though he had left her and her mother two years before his spree, it was enough that she shared his blood – parents demanded that she be expelled from her middle school because it was “upsetting” and “she'd probably turn out just like him.” By the time we meet Jihyeon at age eighteen, she's managed to be under the radar, but her life has been well and truly derailed…and it only gets worse when some old middle school classmates find her and broadcast her whereabouts online. Further complicating matters, there's a new serial killer in town, a murderer known only as Number, who takes out people with no apparent rhyme or reason, always leaving a number carved on his victims' hands.

GK and BaBom's Destined Killer, available on WEBTOON, is a dark, twisting tale that keeps you guessing. Are some of the plot points a bit predictable? Sure, but that doesn't detract from the tight pacing and more surprising elements. Number, we learn in the first two chapters (essentially a prologue), can see numbers above people's heads that denote the number of deaths they'll be responsible for over their lives. He only kills those whose number is over one, the reasoning being that the deaths will cancel each other out. Does this take into account that one or more of the deaths will be more or less deserving? No, but that's not Number's concern; he just wants to save as many people as possible. Some of his victims are horrible; others are more up in the air. But when he spots Jihyeon, he's stunned by the number over her head – and he doesn't know that she also sees numbers, a countdown of how long they have left to live.

It's unclear why either of them has this power, but it does seem like they're meant to complement each other. The numbers Number sees are dark and ominous, but Jihyeon's numbers are bright, and a green light shows when she uses her power. It feels unlikely that she's destined to become a killer herself, because it feels too reductive, although I may be giving the story too much credit. But the use of color – a few bright blasts in an otherwise grey world – and the twists in the first eight chapters are interesting enough to make this an intriguing read. Horror fans and mystery fans alike ought to give it a chance.