Best New K-Comics to Read in August

As the summer winds down, it's the perfect time to settle in with some easy, engaging reads. K-Comics sites have plenty to offer in the usual variety of genres, with a definite emphasis on tales of the ghostly and supernatural to beat the end-of-summer heat. Whether you're looking for a romcom, the world's scariest dating sim, or an unusual shapeshifter, browse our picks for what to read this August to make the transition to fall a little easier.

---

If You're Looking for a Foodie Isekai: The Moment When You and I Meet (Manta)

Anna isn't sure what's going on. The last thing she remembers is going to bed in modern Korea after celebrating her work in her restaurant, but now she's a kitchen maid in an emperor's palace – and a lowly one, at that. Everyone around her knows who she is, but she has no memories of ever being Anna, which makes things very complicated when it turns out that she retains all of her modern culinary skill. People are shocked when she (unwittingly) shows off her talent, but poor Anna is just desperate to keep her head above water.

Although we don't learn much in The Moment When You and I Meet's first five chapters, adapted by YunAh from the work by Effy, with art by rue, it already seems very clear that someone, probably the original Anna herself, wanted the present Anna to be right where she is. When Anna is at her lowest point, she finds a journal that writes itself as she questions her situation, and it feels very likely that this is the way the original owner of her body can communicate with her. There are details of what the picky emperor will eat, suggestions for how to act, and even summaries of her days, all designed to both put Anna on solid ground and to ensure her success in whatever it is she's been sent there to do. It's almost certain that it has to do with Anna's deceased sister, whom another servant mentions, but Anna herself doesn't know much about that yet.

Naturally, the story is setting up a romance between Anna and the young emperor, but these early chapters aren't terribly concerned with that. The mystery is the strongest and most prevalent story element, and it is an interesting one. Unlike many isekai tales, this one doesn't belabor its points, and we're nearly as in the dark as Anna is. The art isn't great, which is a shame (albeit not as much of a shame as the CG horses in one chapter), but the story is intriguing enough to merit giving this a try.

If You're Looking for Dating Sim Horror: Ghost Dating Simulation (WEBTOON)

There are plenty of stories about getting dropped into a dating sim, but Ghost Dating Simulation by Dong9 may be the most unique I've encountered. There's no isekai component to this one, so no getting pulled into a game world. Nor is the game world meshed with the real world – instead, the game allows players to see parts of our world that are normally invisible to the eye…ghosts.

Aspiring streamer Doyeon Choi is known for his livestream freak-outs when playing horror games. It's not great money, but it's enough to get by on, and his friend Sakje, another streamer, has been encouraging, which helps keep him going. But one day, Sakje disappears, and all Doyeon can think is that he has found a really immersive game that's been keeping him busy. He has no idea how right he is until he gets a mysterious text message with a game link. Trusting Sakje implicitly (although still confused by his radio silence), Doyeon downloads the game, hops in the car, and heads back to his parents' place. But on the way there, something strange happens: the ghost of a young woman appears, broken and bloody, in front of his car. The game chimes to let him know that his first “midnight date” has begun, and that his goal is to help the ghost in front of him to find peace.

It's a chilling but intriguing premise for a story. The game seems less like some evil joke and more like a desperate attempt to help the dead find peace, something Doyeon begins to realize as he calms down and interacts with the young woman, whose name is Yeon Ha. She doesn't remember how she ended up dead; she just knows she was snatched and woke up that way. Doyeon has a hard time accepting that she's real, but she very much is, and that adds a lot of pathos to the story. It's not hard to feel sad for Yeon, whose life was abruptly and violently cut short, and who wants to see her family again. Doyeon's fear remains present throughout these first three chapters (what's free on WEBTOON as of this writing), but he also starts to see Yeon as a person. While he's still unsure that this isn't just the world's most immersive dating sim, the tragedy is also not lost on him. It's both scary and cathartic, which is a perfect space for a ghost story to occupy. Ghost story fans don't want to pass this one by – it's unique and engrossing in all the right ways.

If You're Looking for a Thinly-Veiled BL Excuse: Symbiosis of Luna and Sol (Lezhin)

Boreum and Taeyang have opposite problems: the former has too much yin (dark) energy, and the latter has too much yang (light). According to the shaman Boreum consults in the first chapter, the only solution to his problem is to perform a “bodily ritual” with a man with strong yang energy. Sometimes jumpstarting a BL plot really is that simple.

That doesn't mean that socksoo's Symbiosis of Luna and Sol isn't a fun read, of course. Yes, it's a silly premise, but it's at least grounded in something, which isn't always something you can say. Boreum's excessive dark energy has been affecting him for years; the shaman is his last-ditch attempt to figure out why he's been having so many health problems and other issues. We don't know much about Taeyang yet in these first five chapters, but his overwhelming light energy has given him an insatiable sex drive, a tendency towards fevers, and preternatural good looks, which are definitely not a blessing for him based on how he acts when people bring them up. Being known around campus as “Apollo” isn't his favorite thing, either. Unlike Boreum, he doesn't seem to know what the precise solution to his problem is, but after helping the other man on the street and bringing him home, he starts to get an inkling – while Boreum is on his couch, Taeyang actually sleeps through the night, fever-free. Of course, then he discovers that Boreum forgot a backpack stuffed with sex toys and condoms when he fled after waking, so maybe he's going to figure the rest out pretty quickly…This may be thinly veiled, but that makes it the right kind of BL ridiculousness, so if that's what you're looking for, give this a try.

If You're Looking for a Real Corporate Nightmare: How to Survive Downsizing (Tapas)

On the surface, How to Survive Downsizing looks an awful lot like Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint. That's not a bad thing, especially given the incredible amount of Solo Leveling-style series out there; a survival death game devoid of the usual RPG trappings still feels like a breath of fresh air. In the case of Sunjoowoo and Ruhong's series, the game aspect is filtered through a lens of corporate downsizing as well: when the story opens, protagonist Eunho is being fired from his job with that excuse. But Eunho knows that it has more to do with the fact that he's disabled than his work – as a teenager, Eunho was Korea's top track and field athlete before an injury from a car accident got drastically worse and severely messed up his leg. Now he can't walk for ten minutes, and his boss and coworkers don't even try to hide their snide remarks.

Everything changes, though, when, during lunch, a mysterious voice informs everyone that the Earth has just been sold and that downsizing must commence. People are instructed to reach safe zones, and very soon, it becomes clear why: anyone outside the green barriers is terminated. Eunho and his friend Jieun entered a safe zone at the last minute, assuming it was a game. Still, they're quickly disabused of that notion…and when Eunho is offered a reward for surviving, he learns that he can have his leg healed, giving him (and Jieun) a better chance of survival. As people turn against each other, the two also team up with a recently demobbed soldier, Jaehyeok, and begin figuring out ways to navigate the challenges posed by Earth's new owners.

It's a very tense story, and by the end of chapter five, when the “orientation” finishes, it's hard not to be on the edge of your seat. Yes, Eunho's quick and strategic thinking does seem to come out of nowhere, but it's still easy to get behind him, especially since he's not just looking out for number one – and at one point, he does his best to talk down another man to try to save more people. He's flawed rather than perfect, and that works well with Jaehyeok's “Doberman” (per the story) characteristics and Jieun's slow but steady acclimation to their situation. Just because it's reminiscent of another work doesn't make it derivative, and this is worth checking out.

If You're Looking for an Office Romcom: The Secretary's Secret (WEBTOON)

It's the kind of setup that could only happen in a K-drama or related media. When the (handsome) VP of an airline's (handsome) cousin is set to return to Korea after five years in New York, he immediately picks a (beautiful) manager to act as a spy-cum-secretary to keep tabs on what his (handsome) cousin is actually up to. And naturally, the (beautiful) secretary has plenty of baggage, which means that she can't refuse her (handsome) boss' directive: abandoned by her parents and with her older brother in jail, she's beholden to the company that gave her first a scholarship and then a job.

The Secretary's Secret adapted by jungmi from the work by RoseBean, knows precisely what deck it's playing with. The tropes are all there on purpose, not because it's a derivative work, but because that's the way this game is played. From Jiseok's mustache-twirling plans to Taebeom's equally silly plans to force Hyewon to quit, this series knows precisely what it's doing and is having a lot of fun doing it. Jiseok may be very one-note, but as the first four chapters unfold, we can see that there's more to both Taebeom and Hyewon than basic templates. Hyewon is a lot stronger than Taebeom or Jiseok assumes (although [handsome] lawyer Yanghun seems to have figured her out). Still, she's deliberately keeping things to do her job best, no matter how annoyed she is by both of her bosses. Taebeom is perhaps a bit more vulnerable than he wants to appear, but he's also completely baffled by his new secretary and her aggressively sparkly perkiness. She's basically Secretary Barbie, bright and shiny and not at all submissive, even though she makes a decent show of it.

The mood goes back and forth between being goofy and serious, and they don't always sit comfortably together. But most of the humor, such as Hyewon's misunderstanding about who “Kim” is and Taebeom being flummoxed by Hyewon's behaviors, not to mention the bet he has with Yanghun involving Hyewon and a watch, are all hits rather than misses. It's clear that there's a romance brewing between Taebeom and Hyewon, but that's par for the course for this sort of story, and the joy of The Secretary's Secret isn't that it refutes the tropes, but that it understands them.

If You're Looking for Some WTF: Killer Whale Protocol (Manta)

First there were werebadgers. Then there were hedgehog shifters. Hell, there's even a series about reindeer (as in Santa's) shifter romance. So really, Manta publishing Gongsam's Killer Whale Protocol isn't out of the norm. However, it is still somewhat unusual for the site itself, which, while it boasts a lot of romance-fantasy hybrids, doesn't tend to lean into this particular paranormal subgenre, much less the levels of insanity it can reach.

And for all of my flippancy, Killer Whale Protocol actually isn't all that weird, all things considered. The story takes place at a marine research facility, where eager young intern Hyoseo has just begun working. An enthusiast of all things marine life, but particularly orcas, he's surprised when the facility has a secret pool with one in it that's mainly kept off-limits. Because of coworkers bullying him, Hyoseo ends up spending a lot of time in the storage unit attached to the pool, and that leads to him bonding with the nameless orca. However, while Hyoseo doesn't notice anything unusual about his new pal, we readers can see that the choice of red and black for the base color scheme isn't just a random one – there's something sinister at play. The orca is watching everyone who's unkind to Hyoseo, and by the time these five free chapters end, he's hurt – maybe killed – two people to make it so that Hyoseo can just spend time with him…in the human form he's inexplicably able to take.

Hyoseo, of course, doesn't realize that the muscle-bound, shirtless young man who showed up at the pool after the “obstacles” were taken away is the orca, nor does he recognize that the man is obsessed with him. There's some implication that the orca isn't naturally a wereorca, but instead was made into a shifter by dodgy scientific experiments at the facility, something he'd doubtless be aghast at if he knew. The orca also seems to have known Hyoseo from before they met at the pool, so a lot is going on here. All of it is bizarre, but that makes it harder to stop reading.