Three Questions About ‘Monnara Iunnara’
A reader wants to know (I’m paraphrasing here): First, the series was first published in June 2004, but are there any new developments, other than bloggers just catching on now? Second, Gimm-Young looks like a reputable publishing house — they carry a lot of big American titles. Does anyone else know anything else about them? Third, are there any recent articles documenting the popularity of the series, whether in Korea or anywhere else?
Your help is greatly appreciated. I may post some translations later, and if so, I’ll merge this post into that one.
Joshua,
I was unable to find sales data on the specific title itself, but the series has sold more than ten million copies:
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200407/200407220037.html
http://english.kbs.co.kr/society/people/1432164_11774.html
I finished translating all of the cartoon images at Flickr.
Joshua,
I did a Naver search on Rhie Won-bok:
http://search.naver.com/search.naver?where=nexearch&query=%uC774%uC6D0%uBCF5&sm=tab_sug
There is a National Assemblyman by the same name, so some of the results are not relevant. At the top of the search results are two who’s who photos. On the right is the Assemblyman. On the left is the author.
Below I’ve listed some interesting links:
his homepage:
http://www.won-bok.com/
the infamous book on sale at Naver:
http://book.naver.com/bookdb/book_detail.php?bid=170245
He wrote a series called “세계사 ì‚°ì±…” (Strolling Through World History, which appears at the Joongang Daily’s website and was probably published in print:
http://news.joins.com/issue/star/200609/4760/
This comic strip introduces readers to major world religions:
http://article.joins.com/article/article.asp?Total_ID=2611754
I won’t translate all of it, but the punchline is that Western values don’t fit East Asians because Westerners are individualistic while Asians are group-oriented.
Most of the blog links are glowing reviews of his books.