About
King for All is a story set in 7th-century Samhan, at the end of the Three Kingdoms Period.
Inspired by the 2009 K-Drama series The Great Queen Seondeok, it was supposed to be a webcomic series originally, but I’m putting the text version on here first for now.
One major theme of this story is political satire — highlighting the absurdities of the social systems of each of the Three Kingdoms, and how they ultimately led to tragic and avoidable events.
When I was a child, I used to watch dramas and movies about this period, which naturally tend to romanticize the heroes and stories. However, as I grew older and did more research, it became increasingly clear how absurd many of the situations the people of the era found themselves in, actually were.
It also speaks to many human flaws — every character is a unique product of their environment, and the course of the story makes it abundantly clear how each person’s life has shaped who they are.
I hope you enjoy it!
How it was made
The script
The whole book is one file of scenes: 99 episodes in 3 parts. Each episode is a run of blocks: narration, dialogue, scene headers, flashbacks, record quotes and the widgets below.
Every line is written twice, in English and in Korean, and the Korean is written to be said aloud, not translated. Each speaker has a voice note in the wiki that their lines are checked against.
The narrator is an old storyteller who already knows how everyone ends. He keeps it to himself, mostly.
The people
The wiki is the cast list and the set: every person, place, clan, sword and horse, with the portrait, title and career for each year. Characters age, get promoted, change names and change clothes, and the cards in the script follow along.
The pictures
Every still is painted in one house look: webtoon figures in a watercolour-and-oil world, laid out like a Romantic canvas and lit like a film. Faces come only from the portraits in the wiki, and a visual canon fixes each character’s dress, horse, sword and armour by year, so the same man looks like himself from one episode to the next.
Myths are painted in black ink on bare paper, battles as a painted scroll, and fights in manga angles.
The maps
There is one map. Its borders are drawn site by site, year by year, so the kingdoms swell and shrink as you read. The map on the home page plays that history as a loop.
Reading it
Read it as a script, as a comic, or as the feed the court would have had if it had phones. Settings switch between English and Korean, light and dark, and the three dialogue styles.
The widgets
Between the lines, the script hands you things to hold. One of each, live from the story: