ABSTRACT
This chapter provides critical perspectives on the North Korean nationalist historiography of print art and comics. It aims to understand historiography and its consequences, more than to supplant it. Non-North Korean scholarship argues that the discipline of history and even the understanding of social life in North Korea is inextricably linked with the life and history of Kim Il Sung. A survey of 1970s kurimchaek in the extensive collections of The Ministry of Unification Information Center on North Korea and the Academy of Korean Studies, Seongnam, reveals significant trends in terms of themes, formats and distribution. Lian huan hua is semantically relatively close to the North Korean 'sequential image format' term, but also shares properties with the catch-all term kurimchaek. In Korea the development of newspapers and magazines during Japanese colonization is seen as a formative period of Korean comics culture. The chapter looks at two genres: contemporary society anti-spy stories and war-time stories about patriots behind enemy lines.
