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Women Beyond the Frame - A Study of the Dramatic and Graphic Adaptations of Park Wan-suh’s Namok

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(1), pp.465~512
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.1.013
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : December 14, 2026
  • Accepted : February 14, 2025
  • Published : February 28, 2026

Heo Dokyung 1

1서강대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study compares two adaptations of Park Wan-suh’s Namok: the 1992 MBC TV drama produced as a 6･25 special and the 2019 graphic novel by Kim Geumsook. By examining these adaptations, the paper explores how the framing strategies of visual media—television drama and comics—reshape and transform the narratives of female characters. In this context, the frame serves as a physical boundary that limits the scope of the visual image, while simultaneously functioning as an epistemic framework that defines the perspective through which the world is viewed. By undergoing the process of framing—which involves the strategic selection and exclusion of specific characters and scenes—the frame materializes the narrative's purpose. Consequently, it provides a theoretical foundation for interpreting the characteristics of female representation and the structural transformations of the narrative within the process of media adaptation. The TV drama constructs a closed frame grounded in postwar familial values and reorganizes the original’s characterization accordingly. The tension and affinity between Kyung-a and Mrs. Ok, as well as the complex desires and individual trajectories of Misuk and Diana Kim—elements that exceed Kyung-a’s limited viewpoint in the original—are absorbed into a moral order centered on the family. In contrast, the graphic novel adopts an open framing strategy that highlights women’s acts of remembering and recording their own stories. Park Wan-suh enters the narrative as a character and rewrites her own life through Kyung-a, while Diana Kim’s story unfolds across expanded temporal and spatial layers that suggest further narrative possibilities. The contrast between the two adaptations reveals how the female experiences and relational textures embedded in the original are either reduced or expanded depending on each medium’s framing strategy. While the TV drama incorporates the “beyond-the-frame” dimensions of female desire and narrative possibility into a family-centered value system, the graphic novel reactivates those very layers to foreground the continuity and expansiveness of women’s storytelling. Through this frame-based analysis, the study illuminates how women’s narratives are shaped in the process of adaptation and seeks to broaden the horizon of Korean literary and adaptation studies.

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