BICOF 부천국제만화축제

To overcome the Covid-19 crisis, we mobilized all the resources of science and technology in ways we had never done before.

As a result, the entire world entered the new Web 3.0 era after breaking away from the Web 2.0 era. In the Web 3.0 era, users can choose the people with whom they wish to share their data and receive monetary rewards from a decentralized platform. Recently, cryptocurrency, which uses distributed ledger technology, NFT and P2E (Play to Earn) game, and metaverse technology have heralded the advent of the Web 3.0 era. However, although the entire world looks closer than ever before in this new era, in reality it is not. The gap between nature and humans is widening due to the destruction of the global environment, and big and small wars are taking place all around the world, including the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, threatening our daily life. At the same time, increasingly mechanized labor-free capitalism is oppressing people and destroying humanity.

We are living in an era in which computers rather than bakers make bread. Between bread made by bakers and bread with a machine, it is hard to speculate which one will best please our palate. In the same context, the advent of the Covid-19 virus can be attributed to the destruction of nature by humans, but we are still leading our comfortable lives as we destroy nature.

Such a paradoxical situation is almost instinctive. A gene which could differentiate them is imprinted in our body. The breadth and depth of our perceptible world are expanding gradually as we evolve into higher animals. Humans’ five senses have basically evolved to ensure our survival, but sensual experiences related to culture and art - which go beyond mere survival - also rely on the five senses. The world we know is not the world in itself but the world as we sense it. Therefore, when we deal with the same objects and incidents, we all make different assertions and take sides.

Sensations are unique to humans. Due to the characteristics of human sensations, human sensations are not fixed, unlike animals’ sensations, which are classified into two distinct categories. Recognizing that one’s thinking can be biased is a reflective thought unique to humans. The human world is not a black and white dichotomy, but a nice new world where myriad colors exist in harmony.

In 1932, the English novelist and literary critic Aldous Huxley published the world-famous novel Brave New World, which sharply criticized a future scientific civilization that destroys all human dignity. After nine years of destructive war, the entire world becomes one under the name of the World State. In this world, humans cannot be born by natural pregnancy but must be incubated by an artificial method. What is worse is that human beings are divided into a strict hierarchy of five classes according to the State’s needs. Owing to the advancement of science and technology, all unhappy elements of human life are completely removed and controlled in this brave new world. A protagonist named John refers to his experiences in this new world as the ‘Brave New World.’ However, John discovers what is missing from this Brave New World, namely, deep human feelings and experiences such as tragedy, loneliness, unhappiness, sadness and individuality.

Because humans’ heightened sensory perceptions are imperfect, using science and technology to remove them is tantamount to giving up on being human. Hither and thither, online & offline, reality & fantasy, restriction & freedom, humanistic & artificial, civilization & savagery, a past way of life vs. a new way of life—our human senses’ ability to of classify the world into dichotomy must be expanded.

Accordingly, ‘Isekai’ has diverse meanings. First of all, the opposite of thither is hither, and in this respect ‘Isekai’ means an eccentric or idiosyncratic world. A fantasy world which is referred to in a work of literature or the cartoon genre could be a digital world or an Internet world (Explore) which contrasts with the world of reality.

The Covid-19 era which posed a fatal threat to humans is almost over. So what changed as we lived through the Covid-19 crisis? In the world of art, and of cartoons and cartoonists, has the thinking of the cartoon ecosystem been widened or narrowed? The 2022 Bucheon International Comics Festival presents the flow of the current cartoon world, along with diverse things to see, enjoy, think about and do, while strengthening the ‘Isekai’ where humans should be shaken.