THE AWL is a manhwa that manages to strike the tenuous balance between a compelling story, a meaningful message, and an interesting set of characters. The way it does this isn’t easy; the story has inherent politics to it and that made me go into reading expecting to have a variety of long, didactic teachings wrapped up in a story. I couldn’t’ve have been more wrong in my initial misconceptions. THE AWL follows the toxic and pernicious actions of large corporations. It shows the evils from the perspective of the workers who endure (and eventually resist) them as well as one from the perspective of one of their superiors, who slowly begins to fight for them. This combination of perspectives is one of the major strengths of the text. By developing two characters at once as they operate independently and eventually meet, THE AWL manages to create a sense of constant motion even when the overall story is only just getting started. Combining that with perspectives from workers and strong art depicting their expressions only enhances that feeling.
Written and illustrated by Choi Gyu-seok, THE AWL follows two main characters: a young executive name Lee Soo-in and a union labor activist named Gu Go-sin. Soo-in works for a corporate superstore that abuses employees, blocks their access to advocacy, and seeks to dismiss them unjustly. Go-sin is a tenacious advocate and is where the bulk of the leftist, pro-labor energy comes from in volume 1. Conversely, Soo-in is growing into the kind of mindset that Go-sin has, learning to understand and empathize with his subordinates, recognize the evil in oppressive structures, and finally act against them rather than being a passive observer or someone without the power to act out. The first volume mainly tracks his growth and lays the groundwork for understanding a universe colored by resistance and workplace abuse.
Dual Perspectives
When I reference the dynamic between Soo-in and Go-sin, I don’t mean from their literal interactions, as it’s not until well into the story that they even come into contact. Both act as points of comparison for one another; Soo-in is an insider, relatively young, coming into his activist mindset, and someone whose past THE AWL spends ample time on. Go-sin is fully an outsider (from the perspective of a corporation), relatively old, and very much a full-fledged activist. To compare this to an action series, Go-sin is like the powerful, well known, unclear-past-having hero who the up-and-coming hero learns to look up to and emulate. The manhwa opens with him happening upon and saving a man who has been homeless for two days after getting fired without being paid months of wages. Go-sin more or less saves the man’s life, speaks with him to understand how his job screwed him over, then immediate leverages a network of workers and small businesses to pressure that job into giving him the wages he was owed and setting him back on a more fruitful path.
This initial section establishes the tone of the comic and immediately primes the reader to be disgusted with abusive companies and feel warmly toward community driven responses to them. Then, Chapter 1 begins with an immediate transition to Soo-in being instructed to push out his current employees. In other words, Soo-in’s introduction is the kind of precursor that would have caused the homelessness Go-sin encountered. The distrust and unease between Soo-in and his workers is the complete opposite of the trust different workers and companies have in Go-sin. Moreover, while Go-sin is able to jump right to action when he sees a wrong, Soo-in still hesitates. In his role as an executive, he is expected to follow orders and maximize value for the French leadership of the company. And for the most part, he does.
What the first chapter does especially well with these alternating perspectives is twofold. For one, it creates natural curiosity about Soo-in, someone who seems desperate to make something of himself in structured, rule-follower roles but whose heart and body desperately resist those roles when it harms someone or goes against his principles. Given how much of the volume is dedicated to his backstory, this curiosity is important to keep readers engaged. Secondly, by showing Go-sin engage with workers and understand their plights, the story builds stakes and helps the reader become intimately aware of the kinds of rough material conditions that come into play when executives do seemingly simple things like enforce orders from upper management.
High Stakes, Grounded Conflict
Oftentimes, especially in Western countries like the United States, protest is painted as something childish that people do. In the context of labor activism, individual achievement and autonomy is emphasized as a way to discourage collective action. Similarly, the corporate characters in THE AWL often look out for themselves and act to avoid taking on punishment. Those in power make ridiculous offers to unions and treat them as unreasonable aggressors. But, by showing us the perspective of workers, and drawing a clear line between collective action and worker protection, THE AWL challenges a lot of preconceptions readers might have about protest and invests them in the desires and needs of people on the ground. Metaphors, precise artwork for expressions, descriptive prose…all of these things do a lot of work to reinforce the humanity of the workers. The long, lecture-like blocks of text I expected to see are instead dialogues between people while drawings of the examples they use play out behind the speech bubbles. It’s a truly clever way to work in what would otherwise be an incredibly dense section of text.
Ultimately, you’re certain to find something special in THE AWL if you hate corporations screwing over their employees, have worked for a retailer, or have any sort of empathy toward those who are punished by those in power for no reason at all. This, hopefully, includes almost anyone, and I genuinely would recommend this story to just about anyone who reads. The series launches in English digitally and in-print on September 24th 2024.
The comments are temporarily unavailable for maintenance.