Antisemitism in Korea: Follow-Up

Depicting Jews

Antisemitism in Korea?

(Image from Wikipedia)

The controversy over the antisemitic portions of Far Countries and Close Countries (Monnara Iunnara, 먼나라 이웃나라), by Lee Won-bok (or is it spelled Rhie Won-bok?) has widened enough that even my single post got linked to by a couple of blogs that get rather more attention than Gypsy Scholar: Little Green Footballs and A Distant Soil.

Little Green Footballs links to my post two times via a commenter who goes by the name "New Tommy." I don't know anything about New Tommy -- though the chosen name might suggest that he's either a recently enlisted British soldier or has a brand-new Tommy Gun -- but he has linked to my blog as well as to a number of other sites concerning the controversy, so he must be okay.

The Little Green Footballs blog entry where you can find New Tommy bears the heading "Korean Antisemitism Watch," but it's not about a timepiece worn on one's wrist. Think of "watch" in the sense of "Tornado Watch" -- as in "take heed, keep an eye out, but don't yet run for the storm cellar." I presume that everybody already knows of Little Green Footballs, but just in case one of you doesn't know, then go look around that blog, and decide what you think.

A Distant Soil links to my post directly, in a blog entry titled "When Cartoonists Use Their Powers for Evil." That's an interesting twist on a familiar phrase. From an adolescence immersed in comic books, I remember young superheroes being admonished: "Always use your powers for good!"

Appropriately, the blogger behind the blog A Distant Soil, Colleen Doran, is a comics artist who writes and illustrates a graphic-novel series titled A Distant Soil, which you can read about here. I'd never heard of it -- unsurprisingly, since the world is large, whereas I'm small -- but the preview that I looked at, along with the website complex itself, gives me the impression that the series combines fantasy, science fiction, gothic romance, and epic. Go there, look around, and decide for yourself.

Finally, thanks to the links from these two blogs, my hits shot up a bit yesterday, not so much as when National Review Online linked to my entry on Pope Benedict's Regensburg lecture, of course, but still...