Dragon Raja

Dragon Raja (Korean: 드래곤 라자, Chinese: 龍族, Japanese: ドラゴンラジャー) is the first series of fantasy web novels written in 1998 by Lee Youngdo, a widely recognized author in South Korean fantasy and science fiction literature. The books chronicle the adventures of a 17-year-old boy Hutch Nedval, his mentor Karl Heltant, and his friend Sanson Percival, all of whom are from the poor town of Fief Heltant in the Kingdom of Bysus. The main story arc, told in the first-person by Hutch, concerns the three's quest to rescue their people from the black dragon Amurtaht by finding money to pay the ransom; then to find and protect a lost Dragon Raja girl, who would serve as the bridge between people and dragons and stop a crimson dragon that terrorized the continent 20 years ago. Lee showcased his first chapters of Dragon Raja on October 3, 1997, on a serial forum of an online service provider, HiTel. For the duration of 6 months after the initial debut he updated approximately 12,000 pages of wongoji (a Korean form of Genkō yōshi), a material length equivalent to that of 1715 letter pages, and the story quickly gained popularity. Golden Bough, an imprint of Minumsa Publishing Group purchased the publishing rights, and Dragon Raja was published upon its completion in 12 paperback volumes. Prior to 1998 the fantasy genre in Korea, specifically its medievalist form, was considered unsubstantial and unaccounted for by many, especially the press and the literary world. But Dragon Raja was an immediate success, and became a bestseller fantasy title in Korea. In 2011, Dragon Raja was reported as having sold close to 2 million copies in 4 languages. The success of Dragon Raja prompted two big phenomena in the Korean publishing industry. First, fantasy literature "gained the attention of publishers and...