Generative AI is transforming South Korea’s webcomic sector
Lee drew inspiration for his renegade baseball avengers from the Sammi Superstars, one of South Korea’s first professional baseball teams, whose journey of perseverance captivated a country stifled by military dictatorship. The series gained a cult following among readers seeking a creative escape from political repression, mesmerized by his bold brushstrokes and cinematic compositions that defied the conventions of cartoons.
Kkachi, the rebellious protagonist in A Daunting Team, serves as an alter ego for Lee himself. A scrappy outcast with untamed, spiky hair, he has become a fan favorite who challenges the world with unrelenting passion and a brave conscience. Kkachi reappears throughout Lee’s signature works, each time infused with a new layer of pathos—a supernatural warrior saving Earth from an alien attack in Armageddon and a rogue police officer battling a powerful criminal syndicate in Karon’s Dawn. Over the decades, Kkachi has transformed into a cultural icon in South Korea.
However, Lee harbors concerns about Kkachi’s future. “In South Korea, when an author dies, his characters also get buried in his grave,” he reflects, contrasting them with enduring American comic characters like Superman and Spider-Man. Lee seeks artistic immortality, desiring for his characters to endure not only in the memories of readers but also on web comic platforms. “Even after I die, I want my worldviews and characters to communicate and resonate with the people of a new era,” he states. “That’s the kind of immortality I want.”
Lee is optimistic that AI can assist him in realizing this vision. In partnership with Jaedam Media, a web comics production company based in Seoul, he developed the “Lee Hyun-se AI model” by fine-tuning the open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion. Utilizing a dataset of 5,000 volumes of comics he has published over 46 years, the resulting model generates comics in his distinctive style.
This year, Lee is preparing to publish his first AI-assisted web comic, a remake of his 1994 manhwa Karon’s Dawn. Writers at Jaedam Media are adapting the story into a modern crime drama featuring Kkachi as a police officer in present-day Seoul and his love interest Umji as a daring prosecutor. Students at Sejong University, where Lee teaches comics, are creating the artwork using his AI model.
The creative process unfolds in several stages. Initially, Lee’s AI model generates illustrations based on text prompts and reference images, such as 3D anatomy models and hand-drawn sketches that provide cues for various movements and gestures. Lee’s students then curate and edit the illustrations, fine-tuning the characters’ poses, modifying their facial expressions, and integrating them into cartoonish compositions that AI cannot create alone. After numerous rounds of refinement and regeneration, Lee orchestrates the final product, infusing it with his distinct artistic touch.
AI companies envision a future in which artists can automate the more tedious aspects of drawing, allowing them to focus their creative energy on storytelling and art direction. “Under my direction, a character might glare with sad eyes even when they’re angry or have ferocious eyes when they’re happy,” Lee explains. “It’s a subversive expression, a nuance that AI struggles to capture. Those delicate details I need to direct myself.”
Ultimately, Lee aims to develop an AI system that mirrors his meticulous approach to human expressions. His grand vision includes creating a “Lee Hyun-se simulation agent”—an advanced generation of his AI model that embodies his creative mind. The model would be trained on digital archives of Lee’s essays, interviews, and texts from his comics, which were featured in an exhibit at the National Library of Korea last year, to encode his philosophy, personality, and values. “It’s going to take a long time for AI to learn my myriad worldviews because I’ve published so much work,” he notes.
