Chapter 40 – Rivalry with an Idol
“Man, I went to Comic World recently. There were seriously so many booths?”
“You went to Comic World? Wanna go together next time?”
“Hell yeah!”
The classroom had turned into a complete marketplace.
Maybe because it was the first day, or because the counseling sessions kept dragging on…
No actual classes were happening—just self-study time stretching out.
As the atmosphere loosened up like this—
Kang Min-hyuk, acting like the mature 35-year-old he was…
“Krrrr, that one was fun. The original anime version was pretty good too.”
“Oho! Min-hyuk-kun, you watch way more comics than you let on!”
…was enthusiastically diving into otaku talk—no, deep, meaningful discussions about comics.
After the counseling sessions wrapped up…
“Alright, alright—time for the cafeteria tour. Follow meee!”
Everyone moved together to the cafeteria attached to the dorms and began their first meal.
“The food’s pretty normal…”
“Tonykaku…”
More than the food itself, what caught their eyes was the university-like interior of the cafeteria, the otaku-heavy club promotion posters plastered everywhere along the way, and the seniors’ works displayed here and there.
After that…
“Here’s your department jacket. Come up one by one and grab yours.”
“Wooo!”
They handed out the department jackets in the classroom…
“Workstation seats are assigned by the number you drew. If you want to switch later, you must talk to a teacher first!”
“Yes!”
They drew numbers for the workstations they could start using tomorrow.
For what felt like the umpteenth time since arriving here, Min-hyuk thought—
‘They call it a specialized high school, but this is straight-up university… university.’
He was once again struck by how completely different the vibe, the students, and the teachers were compared to the regular high school he’d attended before.
After spending the whole day going through various entrance procedures like this…
“Kang Min-hyuk, Oh Dong-gyo, Kim Sang-jin, Jung Yo-seop.”
“Yesss!”
“You four will be in Room 501.”
“Understood!”
5 p.m.
Min-hyuk had finally returned to the long-awaited dorms.
“Krrrr, the room’s actually cleaner than I expected, Min-hyuk-kun.”
“Yeah, not bad at all.”
A long room with two bunk beds, and across from them, four personal lockers—one for each person.
In terms of pure size, it wasn’t exactly spacious for four people.
‘Well… it’s just for sleeping anyway.’
They had a separate studio for work, and meals were in the cafeteria.
For Min-hyuk, as long as it was a decent place to sleep, it was more than enough.
It showed some signs of previous use, but a quick clean would fix that.
“Any spot you want?”
“You pick whatever’s comfortable.”
“Then I’ll take the bottom bunk… ahem, since I weigh a bit more.”
They each claimed their spots and unpacked.
“Free time until dinner, right?”
“Oho, I’m planning to read some comics.”
Swoosh!
Oh Dong-gyo pulled a manga volume from his bag and grinned.
Min-hyuk watched his passion with quiet admiration (?) while cleaning his own area.
Then—
Bzzz bzzz! Bzzz bzzz!
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
Wondering if it was Mrs. Hong Mi-seon, he pulled it out…
“Hm?”
[Editor Go Gwang-jin]
The name stared back at him.
“I’ll take this call real quick.”
“Oho!”
Min-hyuk stepped out into the hallway and answered.
<<Hey, Artist Min-hyuk! How’d the entrance ceremony go?>>
“Yeah, it went fine. What’s up? You don’t usually call just to chat.”
<<Well, partly to congratulate our Min-hyuk artist-nim… and partly to deliver some good news.>>
His voice was brimming with barely contained excitement.
Min-hyuk snorted softly through his nose.
“What is it? Don’t drag it out—just tell me.”
<<First off, the results from the January-February reader poll just came out today.>>
“How high did we rank?”
Min-hyuk swallowed hard as he asked.
Reader polls.
In the webtoon era, rankings and sales were visible in real time through downloads and charts.
But in this period of print magazines, that was impossible—so they relied on one classic system:
The reader poll.
For a set period, readers of the magazine voted for their favorite series.
The higher you ranked, the more perks you got: promotional goodies (stickers, cheap plastic fans, etc.), color pages at the front, even full-color covers.
And conversely, if your rank tanked…
‘Shipping end.’
Just like what had happened to Shin Pil-ho last year.
The series gets abruptly canceled—whether the author wants it or not.
That’s how crucial poll rankings were to print magazine artists.
<<Dead last.>>
“Seriously?”
<<Just kidding. First place.>>
“Oi, stop with the weird jokes already.”
<<Hahaha! Sorry, your reaction was too funny. First place—first place! You’ve been champion for four straight months now, our Kang artist-nim!>>
“Huuu…”
This guy…
Min-hyuk let out a long sigh of relief.
<<I casually asked about Volume 1 sales too. Just under 20,000 copies sold so far. That’s really good.>>
“Is that considered good?”
<<Of course it’s insanely good! In a market where 3,000 copies is already ‘well done,’ 20,000 is a mega-hit! Our Min-hyuk artist’s gonna get rich, huh? Treat me to a meal later, okay?>>
“Hmm…”
Min-hyuk’s mind spun quickly.
The current retail price of <Brave King> volumes was 4,000 won, with royalties around 8%.
That meant roughly 320 won per copy coming to him.
If 20,000 copies sold…
‘Around 8 million won?’
Volume 1 had been out for about two and a half months.
Add in serialization fees and subtract assistant payments… roughly 3.3–3.8 million won per month.
Considering 2006 prices, that was already a huge amount—not just decent, but genuinely big money.
But if he were being brutally honest…
‘Even adjusting for inflation… it’s still pretty small.’
In the 2024 webtoon market—even for a tiny minority of top works—some series hit hundreds of millions in revenue on launch day alone.
Yet here, even ranking #1 in the poll only brought in this much?
Then lower-ranked artists… didn’t even need to be mentioned.
Only now did Min-hyuk truly feel in his bones how devastated the Korean comic industry was at this point.
‘Well… for now, I’ll take what I can get.’
Right now, as long as drawing didn’t interfere with his life, and he earned enough to help Mrs. Hong Mi-seon, that was sufficient.
At this stage, drawing for print comics also had meaning beyond money:
It was a chance to study and absorb the medium itself.
The real disappointment wasn’t the money—it was that <Brave King> wasn’t reaching more readers.
Min-hyuk squeezed his eyes shut.
‘Well… that’s exactly why I planned <Brave King> this way in the first place.’
<Brave King> was a survival genre story.
Which meant characters inevitably kept dying…
And because of that core premise, long-running shonen-style serialization was structurally impossible.
According to the original plan, it would most likely conclude around Volume 5 at the latest—Volume 4 at the earliest.
After bringing it to a proper, satisfying end in the print market…
‘I’ll move to webtoons. And… I’ll floor the accelerator as hard as I can to make the webtoon market grow faster.’
It might sound like hubris, but he had confidence.
If the current him jumped into the early webtoon scene…
If he brought 2025-level grammar, pacing, and techniques ahead of time…
He might actually accelerate the flow of the webtoon market—and the transformation of Korean comics itself.
‘Well… that’s still a long way off.’
But for that very reason, Min-hyuk was determined to push <Brave King>—the work he was drawing right now—to the absolute highest quality he could manage.
While he was lost in thought for a moment—
<<Oh, and there’s one more interesting piece of news—should I tell you? Or maybe… tense news is more accurate?>>
“Hm? News? What is it?”
<<You know Yang Jae-han, the author of <Aureka>, right?>>
“Of course I do.”
<<He’s making a comeback with a new series soon. Launching around May, apparently.>>
“What?”
<<Yeah. Word is he’s returning to <New Chance>.>>
Min-hyuk’s eyes widened in shock.
“But… didn’t Yang Jae-han retire?”
<<Yeah, he did. But apparently, according to Manager Song, he’s regained his passion for comics or something like that. Anyway, the man’s skill is legendary, so for our magazine, this is a huge blessing.>>
“…”
‘Yang Jae-han is coming back?’
Yang Jae-han of <Aureka>.
The monumental figure who, in Min-hyuk’s childhood, made him realize “Korean comic artists can be this good.”
But in his previous life, after concluding <Aureka>, Yang Jae-han never returned to the industry.
Min-hyuk remembered it vividly—he’d sent fan letters to <New Chance> so many times out of sheer regret.
‘But now… Yang Jae-han is coming back? Why all of a sudden?’
Min-hyuk’s eyes blinked rapidly.
He quickly realized there was only one thing that had changed between his previous life and this one in the <New Chance> comic world.
‘Is this… the butterfly effect?’
The classic regression trope: the protagonist returns to the past and unknowingly alters the future.
In other words… had serializing <Brave King> somehow influenced things?
“Haha… that’s… great news.”
A complicated mix of emotions leaked out as a dry laugh.
The awe of knowing a genius like Yang Jae-han had been inspired (maybe) by him to pick up the pen again.
The pressure of now having to compete head-on for the top poll spot.
And pure, innocent excitement and anticipation as a reader.
It was a feeling that wasn’t wholly joy, nor wholly dread—just… complicated.
Then Gwang-jin spoke again.
<<Oh! But hey—we can’t lose, right? Let’s defend first place with everything we’ve got.>>
“Yes! Of course.”
<<Krrrrr, that’s the spirit! That’s our Kang Min-hyuk! Love that fire! Oh, and this isn’t confirmed yet… but whether we beat Yang Jae-han or not could completely change how we wrap up the year for our series.>>
“What do you mean?”
<<You know our comic awards, right? The ‘Our Comics Awards’?>>
“Yeah, roughly.”
The Our Comics Awards.
At this point in time, Korea’s biggest comic organization (Our Comics Alliance) collaborated with the Ministry of Culture to hold an annual ceremony honoring the best works of the year.
‘Shin Pil-ho won the New Artist Award there for <Era of the Poor>, right?’
Later it would be overshadowed by the Bucheon Comic Awards and lose some prestige, but right now, winning one of those awards meant being recognized as one of the best in Korea.
“So what about the Our Comics Awards?”
<<We can only submit one work from our magazine.>>
“Huh?”
<<For awards like Artist of the Year, we usually send auteur-style works like Shin Pil-ho’s. For mainstream battle shonen titles aiming for big popularity awards, the magazine only sends its flagship title. That’s kind of an unspoken rule.>>
“An unspoken rule?”
<<Yeah. If you hold #1 in the reader poll through the end of the year, <Brave King> goes in. But if Yang Jae-han beats you… we’ll probably have to submit <Brave King> for the New Artist category instead. That puts us at a disadvantage for later promotions.>>
“Ah…”
Min-hyuk roughly understood.
Winning a major award was usually leveraged hard for promotion—boosting sales and attention.
Just like how Korean films winning at international festivals or K-pop idols charting on Billboard created huge momentum.
So right now, <Brave King> was speeding along the tracks just fine… until it slammed into the massive wall called Yang Jae-han.
From a personal standpoint, it felt like rotten luck.
But strangely…
The moment he realized he would be competing head-to-head with someone he once idolized for the top spot…
Thump! Thump!
‘This… might actually be fun?’
A hot flame began to burn inside Min-hyuk’s chest.