Webtoon featuring school violence halted

A cut from "Furious Elementary School students"

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By Kim Tae-jong

A cartoonist has stopped publishing an online cartoon series featuring school violence after drawing much criticism for promoting brutality among classmates following the suicide of a bullied middle school student.

Kim Sung-hwan, better known by his nickname "Gwigwi", has decided to voluntarily stop his "webtoon" series, "Yeolhyeol chodeunghakgyo (Furious Elementary School Students)", which ran on Yahoo! Korea.

As for the sudden end, the author cited a lack of ideas and pressure from the recent criticism of his work, according to the portal site Thursday.

"He said he felt no more inspiration for the series and pressure from the backlash to the content of his cartoon", an official from the portal site said. "So, we decided to stop publishing the series under an agreement with Kim".

Kim had published the cartoon series for the past three years, but currently, all the episodes except for the five latest ones have been deleted.

But Yahoo! Korea said they will resume after they systematically make the cartoon only available to adults. The cartoon has been criticized for featuring a primary school where children beat up their classmates for no reason in almost every episode.

Other online cartoons are also under fire as school violence has become a major social issue after a middle school student killed himself because he was severely bullied.

With mounting disapproval of violence in webtoons, the Korea Communications Standards Commission also said Monday that it has begun monitoring online cartoons to check their content.

If the commission concludes specific webtoons or their episodes are violent enough to instigate such behavior in students, it will apply a "harmful to youths" rating, and then notify the website operators. Minors will be banned from viewing them.

But Internet users and civic groups retort that this only infringes on people's freedom of expression.