Hodo

Reviews William Schwartz | October 15, 2026 Hodo is written in Korean as 호도 and in Chinese characters as 湖島. It's supposed to be a name, and the scene where the title character imagines her parents naming her is evocative of the comic's overall grim, neglectful tone. Hodo's father think it's a poetic phrase, referring to an island in the middle of a lake. Her mother doesn't like it but also doesn't care enough to argue about it. This is, as Hodo's stories about her parents go, fuzzy and romantic. Yeong Shin-ma's semi-fictionalized narrative revolves around a series of interviews she had with the painter Un Kyoung (은경, 恩庚), discussing various horrible events in her life with a blandness that belies just how awful these vignettes are. Shin-ma's simple art style forces a coherence to the cruelty and abuse that comes remarkably close to achieving the disaffected tone necessary to demonstrate how Un Kyoung copes. Un Kyoung's own influence as a painter on Shin-ma is also noteworthy, as Hodo is filled with artistic flourishes and displaced temporality that feel more in place in an abstract work of art than a graphic novel narrative. This distinctiveness is obvious as soon as you open the ...