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Posted in: Comics, Digital, Manga, Review | Tagged: A Hard Day, Manta Comics, pulp noir, webcomics, Webtoon
A Hard Day: A Pulp Noir Farce Where a Cop Keeps Making Bad Decisions
A Hard Day is a fascinating, curious exercise in Korean webcomics, adapting a 2014 movie about a corrupt cop who messes up, makes a bad decision, then makes even more bad decisions. In many ways, it's a state-of-the-art representation of the Korean webcomics scroll-down format designed for phones. The storytelling becomes more cinematic because it adopts the "montage" form of the panels showing one close-up to another to create more suspense, which makes it perfect for a crime-suspense story.
A Hard Day is a Noir Farce about a Bad Cop Amongst Bad Cops
The plot of A Hard Day is pure pulp noir. Detective Ko is a perpetual screwup: drunken, corrupt (with the rest of her squad), lacking in restraint or self-awareness, and prone to rages and impulsive actions. It starts with her getting drunk on the day of her mother's funeral, skipping out on her sister and young daughter, and into an escalating nightmare of her own making. All it takes is an accident that starts her making the first of a series of terrible decisions that dig her deeper and deeper into the hole she's found herself in. There's a darkly comic farce in how each decision she makes just creates a new, even more, messed up situation she has to react to and make another decision on as the screws tighter on her and her options get fewer and fewer. In the movie, Ko was male, and the webcomic makes a curious decision to make the character female without any change in the story or her decisions. In fact, Ko in the comic does not act any different from a man would: drunken, sloppy, bad-tempered, impatient and utterly lacking in self-awareness. She doesn't even come across as female at all, but that's not surprising because a man writes the script. While we often applaud the use of more female protagonists in genre stories, we can't help but wonder what the point of gender-switching the character here is. Ko has a hard day that just gets harder entirely because of her actions.
If you've seen your share of Korean cop dramas and movies, you might think that Koreans do not have a high opinion of cops. A Hard Day doesn't change that opinion. In fact, the movie and the webcomic seem to torture its cop character gleefully by putting them through the wringer while making it clear that Ko's terrible, awful ordeal is entirely one of his and her own making. In Korean pop culture, cops are generally flawed at best and flagrantly corrupt at worse. In A Hard Day, Ko is not the only bad cop in the police force – virtually every cop is corrupt in a broken system. There's a sense of despair in the storytellers that the system is broken and the rot is institutional. No one is willing to fix it, so one drunken screwup of a cop struggling to keep from being swallowed up is really no different from the rest of us.
A Hard Day is on Manta Comics.
A Hard Day
7/10
A state-of-the-art representation of Korean webcomics, a pulp noir farce about a corrupt cop who ends up in a bad situation that gets progressively worse as she tries to cover up her mistake, which might give us an insight in how Korean pop culture views cops.
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