Moss (์ด๋ผ) was Yoon Tae-hoโs first webtoon. It began on January 15, 2007 on the paid comics webzine Mankkik, stopped when the webzine shut down, resumed on Daum in August 2008, and finished on July 2, 2009 after eighty episodes. The first print volume came out in January 2008, and the full five-volume set was completed by Korea Data House in July 2010. The story starts when Ryu Hae-guk, who had cut off contact with his father Ryu Mok-hyeong, receives news of his death and travels to the remote village where his father spent his last years. The village head, Cheon Yong-deok, and the villagers are polite on the surface but are hiding something, and as Hae-guk digs into his fatherโs death he comes to doubt the very story of how the village was founded. Moss, the thing that quietly spreads where the sun does not reach, describes the place exactly.
Yoon belongs to the generation of artists who crossed over from print comics to webtoons. In a July 2024 interview he recalled that he โsuffered terriblyโ adapting to the vertical scroll while drawing Moss. For his next work, Misaeng, he switched to drawing in page units first and then cutting them vertically. Moss carries all of that trial and error, and as a thriller that builds slowly on faces and silences, it has not aged.
The film opened on July 14, 2010. Kang Woo-suk directed, with Jung Jae-young as village head Cheon Yong-deok, Park Hae-il as Ryu Hae-guk, Yoo Jun-sang as prosecutor Park Min-wook, Yoo Sun as Lee Yeong-ji, and Yoo Hae-jin as Kim Deok-cheon. Despite a 163-minute running time and an adults-only rating, it drew 3.35 million admissions. That year it won Best Director, Best Actor (Jung Jae-young), and Best Supporting Actor (Yoo Hae-jin) at the 31st Blue Dragon Film Awards, and Best Director, Cinematography, Sound, and Art Direction at the 47th Grand Bell Awards. The village set was built in Muju, North Jeolla Province, and the film opened in Japan that November under the title Kuroku Nigoru Mura, roughly โthe village that clouds over black.โ
The reason the title is coming up again is a drama. In a July 2024 interview Yoon said he was writing the drama script for Moss himself, and in an August 2025 interview he said he had been spurred by Kang Full writing the scripts for Moving and Light Shop, and that the project was in pre-production, the preparation stage before shooting, with a production company. He mentioned that there were characters he had drawn with Park Hae-il in mind during the original run, but added that โthere are actors I covet, but nothing has been decided yet.โ As of August 2026 there has been no announcement of a platform or a schedule. Separately, on March 1, 2026 Yoon collaborated on NEW Il-han, a webtoon on KakaoPage about Yuhan Corporation founder Yu Il-han.
The original is available from episode one on Kakao Webtoon, and the English edition is on Toomics. If you have seen the film, it is worth reading to see how the villagersโ stories that did not fit into 163 minutes play out on the page. (As of August 21, 2026)
