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| Sound of Heart casts, with Cho Seok, their creator, on right / Courtesy of Money Today |
By Ko Dong-hwan
"Sound of Heart," a webtoon from Korea's most popular search engine Naver, welcomed its 800th episode on Friday, boasting the longest survival in the nation's webtoon history, sources said Monday.
Embarked in September 2006, the series, written and drawn by the 31-year-old cartoonist Cho Seok, has so far recorded over 2 billion accumulated hits, attracting as many as 75,000 comments in a single episode.
In the 800th episode, the main character Cho Seok (who impersonates the cartoonist) proposes to his girlfriend Ae Bong by asking, "I need a new character for this family-oriented cartoon series. Will you make me one?"
According to the sources, Cho only wishes to make the last episode when his fans demanded it, although the episode smacked of possible ending with his cartoon ego's proposal to Ae Bong.
Sound of Heart, posted every Monday and Thursday, deals with mundane recipes from ubiquitous daily lives and introduces the cartoonist's real entourage, including his brother, girlfriend, parents, pets and even his girlfriend's parents.
According to Cho's interview with the sources, he never blew submission of his cartoon materials to Naver during his 7-year-long career.
Graduated from Jeonju University's video cultural studies in 2002, Cho's vision through Sound of Heart is to infuse intuitive interest in cartoons to those who haven't been generic fans to graphic novels.
