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"Far Countries and Close Countries,¡± a comic book series written by cartoonist Lee Won-bok, a professor at Deoksung Women¡¯s University, has finally reached its destination, that is the United States.
Starting from the Netherlands in 1987, the series has traveled to six European countries, including France, Germany, Switzerland, plus Japan and Korea thus far. This makes the U.S. the 9th country that the series has dealt with in 17 years since it was first published.
The series is a record comic book bestseller that is estimated to have sold more than 10 million copies. Out of three volumes of the U.S. series, ¡°Americans¡± and ¡°American History¡± was first released and the other book ¡°American Presidents,¡± the stories about 43 American presidents, will be published at the end of this year.
Mostly, Lee views the United States as a country founded by immigrants. ¡°There are many things in the United States that we Koreans, as a single race, cannot understand. The United States boasts of an enterprising spirit stemming from pride in having built the country on their own; strong national power as a federation made up of 50 states, each of which is bigger than Korea; an open country representing opportunity and the American dream; excellent human resources as shown from the fact that the country produced 261 Nobel Prize winners. However, they have many problems as well. They are two-faced by expressing unilateralism to the outside world, and competition for survival is enormously fierce because the law of the jungle dominates society. Also, compared to its national wealth, they have a very poor social welfare system,¡± he said.
In his new series, Lee also wrote about his experience and impression during his stay in the United States for one and a half years from 1999 while preparing the book. Lee talked about one of his experiences, ¡°When I arrived in America, I could not rent a room because I had no credit record there. So, I told a real estate agency that I would pay rent for a year in advance. Then, he hurried to sign a contract and even reduced the rent. Through that experience, I learned that the U.S. is a reasonable society that stresses credit, but the background to that is that they do not trust people.¡±
Seemingly conscious of growing anti-American feelings and public demand to take a new approach to a long-time alliance with the U.S., Lee is very careful in analyzing the U.S. in the book. ¡°I tried to exclude my personal views of the United States as much as I could. In the case of the Iraq War, rather than focusing on the war itself, I tried to provide a big framework for American foreign policy through such things as analyzing U.S. strategy in the Middle East and the influence of Jews behind those policies.¡±
(Kim Tae-hoon, scoop87@chosun.com )
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