Yoon Tae-hoโs Misaeng (๋ฏธ์) started on Daum Webtoon, now Kakao Webtoon, in January 2012 and ended with its second season in 2024. The story begins when Jang Geu-rae, twenty-six, who gave up on becoming a professional Go player after failing the qualifying exam, joins the trading company One International as an intern. The title is a Go term for a group of stones that is not yet fully alive; its opposite is wansaeng, a living group. Laying a single move on the board over a single day at the office is the spine of the whole work.
Season one ran from January 17, 2012 to August 13, 2013 and follows Geu-rae alone, surviving the internship and landing a contract position. Season two began in 2015 and moved the stage to Ongil International, the small company Geu-rae and his former colleagues set up, turning it into a story about a company trying to survive. There was a gap of several years in the middle, and the final episode went up in early 2024. In print, season one is nine volumes from Wisdom House and season two is twenty-one volumes from The Origin. As of a March 2023 interview, cumulative sales had passed 2.5 million copies.
What turned Misaeng into a household name was the tvN drama that aired from October 17 to December 20, 2014, with Im Si-wan as Geu-rae and Lee Sung-min as manager Oh Sang-sik. It is often cited as the first case of a webtoon adaptation winning both ratings and critical respect, and book sales jumped after it aired. The comic itself won the Ministry of Cultureโs Todayโs Korean Comics Award and the Presidential Prize at the Korea Content Awards in 2012, the National Assemblyโs Comic of the Year in 2013, and an Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2017.
The reason to pick it up again now is the dramaโs second season. According to a January 2025 report, the tenth-anniversary event brought director Kim Won-seok, screenwriter Jung Yoon-jung, and the original cast, including Lee Sung-min, Im Si-wan, Kang So-ra, Kang Ha-neul, Kim Dae-myung, and Byun Yo-han, together around the idea of a season two, prompted by the webtoonโs second season being finished. As of August 2026, however, there has been no announcement of a schedule or a platform. In a 2023 interview Yoon also mentioned a season three built around marriage among office workers.
The original is available from the first episode on Kakao Webtoon, and the English edition is on Tapas. If you watched the drama first, you can start straight from the season two webtoon: it picks up where the drama left off, with people who left the company to start their own. (As of August 21, 2026)
