Authored by Park Sub-bong and illustrated by Cyclops, Prey is one of those stories that has a potential to reach more heights of popularity if it weren’t limited by language barrier and probably choice of art style. There’s a limited number of sites that host the English translation for this but the Korean version already has the story up to season 3.
Plot
Park Yoon-yeong is that ordinary quiet girl in a corner minding her own business in class except she can see nightmarish creatures no one else can. These creatures don’t seem to be aware of her presence as long as both parties don’t form any contact. Blatantly ignoring these creatures was her only means to live a peaceful life until these creatures started to behave erratically and started to influence the real world on their own.
Characters, Story and Medium
The pacing is slow and told from the shift in perspective between Yoon-yeong and others around her. But this slow pace isn’t a bad thing when trying to build tension in horror and suspense. We do get some momentary visual breaks from the chill scenes when the monsters morph into their grotesque forms in a flip of a panel. A small detail about the reading experience when scrolling vs flipping pages is that scrolling creates a quick visual transition that sometimes underwhelms part of the shock experience.
The story doesn’t spoon feed the viewer with information, it shows through the actions rather than resorting to standard expositions common in manga. The audience are left with the same information whatever the story has exposed so far. There’s no plot armor, at least, to what I have come to know about the story so far. The protagonist and side characters either figure out how to live around these creatures. We figure out the rules of the game as the progress with the story similar to how the side characters get to discover how Yoon-yeong sees the world involuntarily.
What I mean is that if you are going to flip a page to something that hints to something horrible, there’s that seconds of lag where you brace yourself for the visual gore. This small difference added with imagination helps heighten the horror experience. That lag is reduced if you’re viewing the story scrolling down which is how most webtoons are setup. The remedy was adding a large gap in between to make up for the suspense but this also translates to extra scrolling.
A large part of the early world building is telling the story through Minji's perspective (girl from the above image) where Yoon-yeong takes the back seat as we get introduced to the world as an audience. The characters have shown capable to hold their own personality and agency in the story. I find their reactions towards their situation surprisingly grounded to what normal people would do if they have lived with the nightmares versus getting introduced to the other world for the first time.
In the short amount of chapters so far, there are further subplots and character growths that keep the read worthwhile. The main storyline still revolves around Yoon-yeong’s survival while subplots include figuring out what the grotesque creatures are, the historical lore attached to the apparitions, vengeance, and looming danger for society these creatures pose unnoticed. Those few chapters available managed to come up with an engaging world building similar to reading a Lovecraftian style horror where the world is doomed and yet the only ones that knew are isolated heroes called insane.
Art
The lack of bright colors other than red really sets the visual mood that this story has no chill. It’s a standard choice for horror webtoons which are known for having the chapters fully colored in unlike the standard black and white in manga. I think red is fine, it’s the standard color for a lot of things in horror, but yellow or blue eyes might have worked too in my opinion.
There are plenty of areas need to get worked on in terms of hatching and cross hatching. Some illustrations are just oversimplified which makes me think it’s more like a means to save time than an artistic choice. Some monster caricatures just seem like trying to hit the bare minimum of shock factor than focusing on the quality of the image by the smallest details. The art is a pass when it comes to achieving the core expressions of what should be terrifying and achieves adequate tension building but I still think more could be done per panel.
Conclusions
This manhwa would’ve been something I’d binge read if it wasn’t for the lack English translation available and the only site I found that leads up to its season 3 is in Korean. The easily accessible versions barely touched half of the content of season 1 as the introduction. I’d like to pursue this story if there were more English translations available.
I can’t help but compare this story to an existing manga which had a recent anime adaptation called “Mieruko-chan” which has a lot of similarities during their beginning and later diverge based on their circumstances. Prey is like Mieruko-chan but darker and the difficulty bar set higher.
Note: All images came from my screenshots.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.