Kim Woo-young

Kim Woo-young died on 24 September 2026, aged 87. Digital Times reported that he died of old age. The place of death has not been reported.

His death was not made public for about two weeks. The Korea Cartoonist Association posted his obituary on its website on 7 October 2026, and on 8 October the Korea Manhwa Contents Agency and other industry bodies confirmed it, after which Yonhap, Hankook Ilbo, Seoul Shinmun, Asia Economy, Maeil Business and others reported it. Funeral arrangements were not reported.

Kim Woo-young was born Kim Hye-kyung in 1939 in Seoncheon, North Pyongan Province, in what is now North Korea. As a child he came south as a refugee and grew up in Busan, which Digital Times dated to the time of the Korean War. He graduated from Donggwang Middle School and Haedong High School in Busan.

He showed a talent for drawing from an early age. As a working cartoonist he adopted the pen name Kim Woo-young, taking one character from the name of the illustrator Woo Kyung-hee, whom he admired, and one from the general Choi Young. He later changed his legal name to match.

Kim entered the comics world in 1956, while in his third year of middle school, with the comic Mullebanga. He went on to publish period dramas and light comedy comics including Sansongjang, Cheoljjukkkot Pineun Gohyang, Palsakdongi, Seoreumgil Gumanri (1957), Baekje-ui Byeol (1958) and Ureora Joguk (1959).

In 1967 he joined the seventh intake of the animation department at Tongyang Broadcasting Company (TBC). The following year he worked on the Korean-Japanese television animations Golden Bat and Yokai Ningen, part of the first generation of TV animation production in Korea.

His defining work, Ddungddanji, began in the Sonyeon Chosun Ilbo on 1 March 1990. The four-panel strip followed a cheeky boy with three hairs sticking up from his head through school, family life and friendships. Its first run lasted until 1 April 2019, a total of 8,556 instalments. When ill health forced him to stop, he said he had wanted to complete 30 years and pass 10,000 strips.

The character carried a long series of books. Ddungddanji Manhwa Ilgi (1993), a comic diary drawn from the newspaper strips, sold about 380,000 copies. Later titles included Ddungddanji Myeongsim Bogam (1996), Ddungddanji Dokdo Tambangdae (1996), Ddungddanji Myeongeon Sanchaek (1997), a Three Kingdoms adaptation, a Stone Age book, a detective series and an English comic diary.

After recovering his health he returned in 2021 with The Returned Ddungddanji, working on it with members of his family until December 2022. His final book, published in 2013, was a comic retelling of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Kim was a devout Christian. From 1996 he served as the third and fourth president of the Korea Christian Cartoon Mission Association and worked on comics that explained the Bible and Christian teaching in simple terms. Within the comics world he was close to the cartoonists Kang Chul-soo and Lee Doo-ho.

In a 2019 oral history recorded by the Korea Manhwa Contents Agency he described the strain of a daily strip: riding the bus to his studio in Gwanghwamun, he would often be so lost in search of an idea that he missed his stop and rode on to Jongno 2-ga or 3-ga. He said there were many times he thought of giving up and opening a bibim noodle stall with his wife.

Ddungddanji is one of the longest-running children's comic strips in Korean newspaper history, with 8,556 instalments over 29 years and a revival that took the character past 30 years in print. Asia Economy called it the face of children's comics for generations of readers. Its spin-off books, which mixed humour with history, classics, etiquette and English, made the character a familiar part of Korean childhood reading.

His contribution to children's culture was recognised with the Kobau Cartoon Award in 2004 and the Saekdonghoe Nunsol Award in 2009, and his early work at TBC places him among the pioneers of Korean television animation.