— BJOAF 43, 2020 — Between Satire and Nationalism: The Transcoded Pantheon of Hell in the Webtoon Sin kwa hamkke (“Along with the Gods,” 2010–2012) Barbara Wall Since at least 2015 South Korean society has been massively criticized, mostly from within, as being “Hell Chosn,” where Chosn, the name of the last Korean royal dyn- asty, is used as an equivalent to South Korea. The Naver webtoon Sin kwa hamkke by Chu Homin can be understood as a forerunner of the Hell Chosn discourse. In this webtoon (a cartoon on the web), the reader travels with the protagonist through different kinds of hell, which turn out to be satirical versions of contemporary South Korean so- ciety. While the satire has a clearly subversive character and can be taken as social criti- cism, the webtoon also has strong nationalistic tendencies. Although the pantheon of hells, as it is portrayed in the webtoon, draws from diverse sources and is therefore a prime example of intracultural multiculturality, Chu Homin constructs a culturally ho- mogenous picture of the hellish pantheon, thereby emphasizing its pure Koreanness. This paper explores how the webtoon mixes and switches different codes for satirical and nationalistic purposes. This play with different codes demonstrates how national- istic reductionism obscures intracultural multiculturality, thereby concealing one of the strongest appeals not only of Sin kwa hamkke but of Korean culture in general. Introduction Situations that are extremely unpleasant and at the same time inescapable are of- ten compared to hell. Sometimes we also describe whole countries with miserable living conditions as hell. This, of course, always depends on the perspective and the expectations of the viewer. What is hell for some can be paradise for others. One society that has been compared to hell by its own citizens is South Korea, which, especially in social media, is often referred to as “Hell Chosn” (), with Chosn , the name of the last Korean royal dynasty, used as an equivalent to South Korea. According to Yi Uch’ang, an expert on the Hell Chosn discourse (Yi Uch’ang 2016), the term was coined in an article in the newspaper sinmun -i p’iryohae” (“If you are born in Hell Chosn, you need to exert yourself vigorously”; 2015) after which people from diverse social and political backgrounds began to criticize life in South Korean society, widely calling it hell (Yi Uch’ang 2016: 109). ipresent in South Korean media around this time in 2016, the webtoon author Chu Homin had already been playing with the idea of comparing contemporary South Korean society to hell since 2010 (Fig. 1). First, I would like to thank Chu Homin for allowing me to use images from his webtoon in this study. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors of the Bochum Yearbook of East Asian Studies for their thorough corrections and suggestions. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Lee, Maya Stiller, Andrew Logie, Marion Eggert, and Seungsook Moon for their helpful com- ments and advice when writing this article.