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| You Quiz / Photo = tvN screengrab |
[Sports Today reporter Im Si-ryeong] On the April 1 episode of tvN’s You Quiz on the Block, manhwa legend Heo Young-man surprised host Yoo Jae-suk by presenting him with a caricature.
When Yoo invited Heo to draw him, he added, “If you’re going to do it, make me look like the protagonist of one of your works.”
As Heo began sketching in his pad, Yoo peered over and quipped, “You’re drawing the teeth way too big. Why do you always start with my teeth? They stick out so much.” Heo chuckled and replied, “Things don’t always go the way you want,” drawing more laughter.
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The conversation ranged across Heo’s long career. Yoo ticked off a string of hits — Beat, Mr. Q, Tazza, Gaksital and Sikgaek — and mentioned that Heo had once said his early goal was to be a “fifth-place” cartoonist. Heo explained, “You had to be among the top five to avoid being overlooked. So my aim was simply to get into that group.”
Yoo asked how Heo finds such diverse material — history, food, the stock market and physiognomy. Heo replied, “For a creator, material is ammunition. I write down everything.”
He said Sikgaek required three years of reporting. “I realized I couldn’t rely on imagination alone,” he said. “After moving to Seoul I kept thinking about the food from my hometown, and that curiosity kicked the project off. Food ties into memory, so it felt like rich material.”
He also recounted the origin of Tazza. Heo said the gambler who inspired the character Goni kept playing hwatu, and at one point an eight-gwang disappeared — an incident that intrigued him. Learning the man lived near the edge of Jirisan, Heo went to investigate and found that two of the country’s three famed tazza were living there. With large sums of money at stake, he witnessed their techniques firsthand while reporting, and that direct exposure led him to create Tazza in earnest.
[Sports Today reporter Im Si-ryeong ent@stoo.com]
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