What Zipcys Gets Right

Zipcys—Yang Se Eun, a South Korean illustrator who goes by that name online—draws romance in a way that hits different. Sensitive moments between beautiful people, the kind that don’t need anything else. No irony, no cruelty, just two people and whatever’s happening between them. Looking at her work makes something ache a little.

As a teenager I was certain I’d be a manga artist. That was going to be it—years of development, mastering the form, becoming one of the greats. The reality was uglier. Somewhere around page three of everything I started, my brain would derail into explicit scenarios with insect aliens, blood spray, crude anatomy, the works. Every attempt at a narrative would collapse into something filthy and absurd. I’d give up, start something new, and three pages later: same spiral.

So I stopped trying to be that person.

What I actually make is different. Cruder, more explicit, more willing to wallow in the fucked-up corners of sex and violence and stupidity. There’s a pleasure in it—in the refusal to keep things romantic or tasteful. But watching Zipcys’ portfolio, I’m struck by what I gave up. Not the career, but the capacity to draw something genuinely tender without it feeling like I’m mocking myself.

Her illustrations are mostly about desire and attraction—girls and boys, mostly young, in states of closeness. But there’s nothing exploitative about it. It’s romantic without being saccharine, sexy without being crude. The kind of thing that makes you believe in something you’re not sure you believe in anymore.

I’m not going back. The work I make now suits me. But there’s a specific loneliness in appreciating beauty you’re not equipped to create yourself, in clicking through someone else’s vision and feeling that sharp little envy. She found a way to be sincere about romance. I turned sincerity into a joke about beetle aliens and called it a day. That distance—between what I can appreciate and what I can make—that’s just the gap I live in.