By Sungmo Kim
Published by NETCOMICS
Rating: 16+

Chunhoo Kang (whose name also becomes Cheonhoo and Chunhoo Goo in later volumes… chalk one up for continuity!) is the toughest guy in Japan. The problem is, he’s not Japanese—he is Korean. The story opens with Chunhoo asking his mob boss to let him leave… after fighting 80 men in succession using his ultimate martial art known as shi-nan-doo.

Why does he want to leave? He wants to go home to the wife and kid he left behind twenty years ago. Way to be a good father. (More on this part of the story later.) The boss agrees, at the cost of Chunhoo cutting off his right pinky finger. Of course, there are always strings attached and Chunhoo is followed by wave after wave of assassins. He kills them later on and there are so many of them at different points that it is impossible to remember or care about any of them.

Chunhoo’s son is part of a Korean gang and our first glimpse of him is when he is in the bedroom with a random girl. He misses out on a big inter-gang brawl and is asked to take the fall by accepting a prison trip and a death sentence. In the following volumes, Chunhoo will rescue his son from jail, take him into the seediest parts of Korea, try to win his son’s admiration, and pass on his shi-nan-doo legacy.

What are the pitfalls of Emperor’s Castle?

First and foremost is the artwork. While the art does improve over time (in the fight scenes, at least), it never moves beyond bland and stilted. The backgrounds are generic (every time a Japanese swordsman is shown, he is either standing in a bamboo forest or sitting beneath a waterfall) and not once did I come across any scene that left me with that “wow” feeling that most graphic novels offer. And while I am not an artist by any means, when I start realizing that the artist is making errors regarding perspective and vanishing points, it is not a good sign.

Also, for a series that bills itself as an adult action story, there is surprisingly little violence shown. I know what adult action stories from Japan are like. That being said, all of the scenes that would show explicit, gory detail are avoided. When Chunhoo cuts off his finger, the artist cuts away. When a fight breaks out? The characters strike poses, but rarely strike each other. Blood simply appears and, eventually, someone dies.

What does get shown, then? The degradation of plenty of women, for one. The level of misogyny in Emperor’s Castle is through the roof. The women in this series exist for only two purposes: they are either abuse victims or one-dimensional sex objects. The first time Chunhoo’s wife appears in a flashback, she is pregnant and he is kicking her. I’m going to point that out again. He kicks his pregnant wife. Then, once she is down, he makes sure to let her know that she needs to abort the child.

All of the other women in the story are used for sex and most of them don’t have names. At one point, in volume four, Sukgi Goo (Chunhoo’s son) falls into a pit on a snowy mountain. He is rescued by a dark-skinned woman in a one-piece bathing suit (it is snowing, I remind you) who decides the best thing to do with an unconscious stranger is go down on him. If you just felt a pang of nausea, I feel your pain. Pages later, when he saves her from being raped, she rewards him with sex.

That, however, is not the worst example of the absolute lack of respect women are shown in this series. This is best illustrated through the character of Semi, the prostitute. She is blonde and silent and Chunhoo and Sukgi are hiding out while living with her and her pimp. Semi gets hired. A lot. And Kim feels the need to constantly show her having sex with multiple men at once. It is also rape, as she has no control over her clients and is constantly asking them to stop. At the end of volume two, after showing her forced into yet another gangbang, Kim cuts to a very disturbing scene of her condition afterwards. Honestly, I should have stopped there.

Emperor’s Castle is awesomely bad. More awesomely bad than you could ever, ever expect. It is a rice-paper-thin revenge tale featuring macho men who kill people and have sex with random women. Isn’t that glorious?

Volumes one through four of Emperor’s Castle are available online at NETCOMICS.com. The first three volumes have also been released in print editions.