Bastard Webtoon Review — A Sickly Teenager Knows His Father Is a Serial Killer

I read Bastard on the Webtoons app during my morning commutes one winter. I started in October. I finished in February. By the end, I was reading it in 30-second bursts on subway platforms, unable to wait until I got home to find out what happened next. It is one of the few webtoons I have read at that pace, and the only one I have re-read deliberately to study the craft.

This is also, fair warning, one of the darkest things I have ever read.

Quick Take

• Carnby Kim and Youngchan Hwang's 2014 thriller webtoon. Same creators as Sweet Home. Some readers consider it their tighter, scarier work
• Premise: a sickly disabled teenager whose father is a serial killer. He has known since childhood. He has survived by helping
• Age rating: M (Mature) — 18+ — graphic violence, child abuse, sustained psychological horror

Bastard Webtoon vs Manhwa vs Manga: Is This a Japanese Manga?

This article exists on a Japanese manga review site, so let me clarify directly:

Bastard is a Korean webtoon (manhwa), not a Japanese manga. The work is:

• Originally Korean: serialized on Naver Webtoon from 2014 to 2015 in Korean
• Author/artist Korean: Carnby Kim (writer) and Youngchan Hwang (artist) are both Korean
• Format: vertical-scroll webtoon designed for mobile reading, the standard Korean webtoon format

The site primarily covers Japanese manga, but Bastard is included because:

1. It has been licensed widely in English (Webtoons platform + Seven Seas physical editions)
2. The Korean horror webtoon scene has significant overlap with Japanese manga readership
3. Carnby Kim and Youngchan Hwang's other works (especially Sweet Home) have brought significant Japanese-manga-fan readership to their work

If you searched expecting a Japanese manga: it isn't one. But it is excellent, and worth reading if you can engage with the content.

What Is Bastard Webtoon About?

Seon Jin is a high school student in South Korea. He has a chronic illness that has left him physically weakened and partially disabled — he has limited mobility in his right arm and one eye is non-functional. He is bullied at school. He has no friends. He keeps his head down and tries to survive each day.

His father, Master, is the manga's central character even when not on-page. Master is wealthy, charming, beloved in the community, a successful businessman, a devoted single father. He is also a serial killer who has been murdering young women in the city for many years.

Seon Jin has known since childhood.

Master uses Seon Jin as bait. Specifically, Master's hunting pattern relies on his son: Seon Jin's disabled, harmless appearance is used to put young women at ease. Master meets women socially, brings his sweet sick son along, the women relax around the boy, the women trust the father — and then Master kills them. Seon Jin has been part of this pattern since he was small. He has helped. He has stayed silent. He has done what he had to do to survive.

The webtoon opens when Seon Jin is in high school and is, finally, beginning to break. A new student — Yoon Kyun, a popular, friendly girl who actually treats Seon Jin like a person — enters his life. His father notices. His father starts to take an interest in her.

Seon Jin has to decide whether to do what he has always done, or to do something different.

The webtoon runs 94 chapters across 2014–2015, complete. The story has a clear endpoint. Carnby Kim has called it his most narratively focused work — Sweet Home is longer, but Bastard is tighter.

Where Can I Read Bastard in English?

Two options:

1. WEBTOON app/website (free) — The full 94-chapter series is available in English on the official WEBTOON platform (the global publishing arm of Naver Webtoon). The chapters can be read in their original vertical-scroll format, free, with the original color art
2. Seven Seas Entertainment physical/digital print editions — As of 2024, Seven Seas has licensed and begun publishing physical print editions in English. Volume 1 released May 2025, with subsequent volumes following. The print edition reformats the vertical-scroll webtoon into traditional manga page layout

Recommendation: read the WEBTOON version first — it preserves Hwang's original color art and vertical-scroll pacing, which were designed for the medium. The Seven Seas print edition is a strong physical companion for fans who want to own the work but the reading experience is significantly different from the original webtoon format.

Who Is This Webtoon For?

• Horror webtoon fans — Bastard is in the top tier of Korean horror webtoons of the 2010s
• Sweet Home readers who want the same creative team's tighter work
• Psychological thriller readers comfortable with extreme content
• Mobile readers who enjoy the vertical-scroll format
• Not for: readers who cannot read past serial killer content involving children; readers seeking lighter horror

Content Warnings & Age Rating

Age Rating: M (Mature) — 18+ Content Warnings: Serial killings (frequent, graphic in description but restrained visually); child abuse (Master's treatment of Seon Jin is extensive and severe); violence against women (the murder victims are young women, depicted without graphic gore but with significant emotional weight); psychological abuse (the manipulation Seon Jin has experienced is the webtoon's primary subject); disability portrayal (handled with care, but Seon Jin's disability is plot-central)

The M rating is earned. This is some of the darkest material in current webtoon publishing.

Story Overview

Chapters 1–20: Setup. Seon Jin's daily life. The introduction of Yoon Kyun. Master's first attention to Kyun. The reader gradually understands the family dynamic and Seon Jin's role in his father's pattern.

Chapters 21–50: The middle of the story. Seon Jin's psychological situation deepens. His relationship with Kyun complicates. Master's pattern intensifies. The reader learns more about Master's history and methods. Multiple major plot turns reshape what Seon Jin thinks is happening.

Chapters 51–80: The endgame begins. Seon Jin makes a series of decisions about his own complicity and his own future. The webtoon's most narratively risky sequences are in this stretch. Some readers find the pacing here intense; others find specific choices controversial.

Chapters 81–94: The conclusion. Carnby Kim brings the story to its endpoint. The ending is one of the most-discussed in Korean webtoon history; readers are divided on whether it lands or feels rushed.

Characters

Seon Jin — The protagonist whose specific psychology is the webtoon's central subject. Seon Jin is not portrayed as weak in the conventional sense. He is physically disabled, has been systematically traumatized, and has been weaponized by his father since childhood. What the webtoon traces is whether he can locate any agency at all under the conditions his father has constructed.

Hwang's character design for Seon Jin is one of the webtoon's most carefully constructed elements. The body language across chapters tells a parallel story to the dialogue.

Master (the father) — Charismatic, calm, charming, terrifying. Master is one of the most chillingly drawn villain characters in current webtoon publishing. Carnby Kim writes him as a person who genuinely loves his son in some twisted way, which makes the relationship more unbearable than a straightforward abuser would be. The character has been compared to Hannibal Lecter and to some literary serial killers, but Master is more domestic and more recognizable.

Yoon Kyun — The new student who treats Seon Jin like a person. Yoon Kyun is the webtoon's emotional anchor for the reader — the character whose safety we worry about most, the character whose presence forces Seon Jin to confront what he has been doing.

Manny — A delinquent classmate whose violence toward Seon Jin in the early chapters becomes complicated by what Manny later learns about the situation. The Manny arc is one of the webtoon's more morally interesting threads.

Art Style

Youngchan Hwang's art is clean, atmospheric, and built for the webtoon scroll format. Vertical-scroll webtoons require specific visual techniques — long panels that reveal information progressively, color shifts that mark emotional transitions, panel breaks that work as scroll pauses. Hwang is one of the strongest practitioners of webtoon-specific art in the current generation.

The color work is significant. Most of Bastard uses a muted color palette — washed-out blues, grays, sickly yellows. When red appears, it carries weight. Hwang's restraint with violent imagery — keeping most of the killings off-panel or in shadow — is part of why the horror lands.

The character expressions, particularly Master's small smiles and Seon Jin's restrained micro-reactions, are some of Hwang's best work.

The Seven Seas print edition reformats the webtoon for traditional page layout. The reformatting is competent but loses some of the scroll-pacing effects. Fans who started with the original webtoon often prefer the original format.

Cultural Context

Bastard ran on Naver Webtoon (Naver 웹툰) from 2014 to 2015 during the period when Korean webtoons were transitioning from a Korean-domestic format to a global publishing phenomenon. Bastard was one of Naver's most-read works during its run.

Carnby Kim and Youngchan Hwang are now the most internationally recognized Korean horror webtoon creators, largely on the strength of Sweet Home (2017–2020), which was adapted by Netflix into a major K-drama. Bastard is the earlier work that established their reputation in Korea.

The webtoon engages with Korean class and disability discourse. Master's social position (wealthy, respected) is part of his protection; Seon Jin's disability is part of his isolation. The combination — the systemic invisibility of disabled people, the systemic credibility of wealthy charismatic men — is what allows the killings to continue undetected. This social commentary is present throughout the work without being lectured.

A Korean live-action adaptation of Bastard has been in development since 2020 with multiple announcements but no release date as of 2026.

What I Love About It

The chapter where Seon Jin tries to warn someone.

I won't say which chapter specifically. Somewhere in the middle of the webtoon, Seon Jin reaches a point where he genuinely tries to alert someone outside the family to what his father is doing. The attempt is small — not a dramatic confession to police, just a careful private suggestion to a specific adult who might be able to act. The chapter follows Seon Jin's preparation, his approach, his attempt, and the result.

What I love is what doesn't happen. The adult does not believe him. Carnby Kim writes the scene with the specific awful texture that real disclosure scenarios have. The adult is sympathetic. The adult listens. The adult ultimately concludes that Seon Jin is confused, or stressed, or seeking attention. The attempt fails entirely. The adult goes on with their life and does not act.

What this scene gives the webtoon is moral seriousness about disclosure. Most thriller fiction has the disclosure work — the right person is told and the right action follows. Bastard refuses this convention. The webtoon understands that disclosure usually does not work, especially for victims who are disabled, marginalized, or psychologically conditioned to be unconvincing. Seon Jin is not in his situation because he hasn't tried to tell anyone. He is in his situation because he has tried, repeatedly, and nobody has been able to help.

That scene is the webtoon's argument for why Seon Jin's eventual choices matter. He is not making them from a position of moral simplicity. He is making them after the world has demonstrated that it will not save him. What he does has to come from inside the situation, not from outside it.

I think about this when I think about why people stay in impossible situations. The answer is not always that they don't try to leave. Sometimes the answer is that they have tried, and the world has shown them the cost of trying, and they are now operating with the world's actual rules rather than the rules we wish were in effect.

Bastard is honest about those rules. That honesty is what makes it horror.

What English-Speaking Fans Say

Bastard has a substantial English-language fan base, primarily built through the free WEBTOON platform release. The webtoon was one of the most-read horror webtoons on the English WEBTOON platform during its run. Reddit r/webtoons threads about Bastard typically describe it as one of the best psychological horror webtoons available in English.

Common comments:

• The vertical-scroll format intensifies the horror; the medium is part of the work
• Master is one of the most chilling villain characters in webtoon publishing
• The ending is divisive; some readers find it perfect, others find it rushed
• The Seven Seas print edition is appreciated as a collector's item but considered secondary to the original webtoon format

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The first time the reader sees Master in his "private" mode.

Without spoiling specifics: early in the webtoon, after several chapters establishing Master's public-facing persona (charming, supportive, beloved), Carnby Kim and Hwang give the reader a single sequence depicting Master alone with Seon Jin — no audience, no performance, no public-facing mask.

The shift is rendered visually. Master's expression changes. His posture changes. The color palette of the panels shifts. The reader, who has been led to wonder whether the protagonist's perception of his father is accurate, is given a definitive answer.

What makes the scene work is its restraint. Master does not become a cartoon. He does not start ranting. The shift is small — small gestures, small phrasings, small differences in eye contact. Hwang draws Master's "real" face with the same physiological details as his "public" face, but with everything pulled slightly different.

The scene establishes the webtoon's central horror: Master can do this. He can switch between modes seamlessly. Seon Jin, who lives with him, never knows from one moment to the next which version he is talking to. The reader, after this scene, never knows either.

That is the webtoon's whole project. The horror is the seamless switching. Bastard is what it is like to live with someone who can be two different people in adjacent moments and choose which one to show you.

Similar Manga / Webtoons

Title	Its Approach	How Bastard Differs
Sweet Home (Carnby Kim)	Same creator's longer horror webtoon	Sweet Home is post-apocalyptic; Bastard is domestic-psychological
Tomie (Junji Ito)	Japanese horror manga, charismatic monster	Tomie is supernatural; Bastard is human-evil
Monster (Naoki Urasawa)	Japanese psychological thriller with charismatic villain	Monster is European-set; Bastard is Korean-domestic. Same emotional register
Killing Stalking (Koogi)	Korean webtoon with psychological-horror domestic premise	Killing Stalking is more romantic-coded; Bastard is more parental-coded

Reading Order / Where to Start

Chapter 1. The webtoon builds from the beginning; do not skip.

For the WEBTOON app: read in order; the platform tracks your progress. For Seven Seas print: start with Volume 1, which collects the early chapters.

Official English Translation Status

WEBTOON (the global Naver publishing platform) has the full 94-chapter English translation available free on the WEBTOON app and website. Seven Seas Entertainment is publishing physical and digital print editions in English, with Volume 1 having released in May 2025. Multiple volumes are scheduled.

A Korean live-action adaptation has been in development since 2020 but has no confirmed release date.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Among the best Korean psychological horror webtoons of the 2010s
• Master is one of the genre's most chilling villains
• Seon Jin's interior is rendered with rare care for a disabled protagonist
• 94 chapters complete with a real ending
• Free official English version available on WEBTOON

Cons

• Heavy content — serial killer, child abuse, disability exploitation
• The ending divides readers
• The Seven Seas print edition loses some of the webtoon's medium-specific effects
• The vertical-scroll webtoon format is an acquired taste for traditional manga readers. It won't land for everyone.

Is Bastard Worth Reading?

Yes — for readers who can engage with the content. The WEBTOON free release removes any cost barrier; the only commitment is your time and your willingness to read genuinely dark material.

Format Comparison

Format	Notes
WEBTOON app/web (English)	Free; full 94 chapters; original color art and vertical scroll format
Print English (Seven Seas)	Volume 1 May 2025; subsequent volumes ongoing; reformatted for page layout
Korean (Naver)	Original release; free for new chapters initially, fee-gated for premature access

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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