South Korean martial arts comics lost a bridge-builder. Seung-nam Ha died Nov. 2 at age 68, the Korea Cartoonist Association announced, Anime News Network reports from Yonhap.
Born in Busan in 1958, Ha entered the industry as an apprentice to Nam-gil Heo and debuted in 1980 with The King of Baseball Without a Nationality. He became best known for Goltong’s Declaration of Departure, which began in Sports Today in 2001 and followed Yoo Se-ok into chaotic martial-arts adventures, plus the related Goltong line from Ha Seung-nam Production and the series Divine Sword and Evil Sword.
Ha also worked abroad — serializing in Taiwan’s Infinite Boys in 1994, publishing Sayaka (2004) and Existence (2005) in Japanese magazines, and drawing a Records of the Three Kingdoms manga. In 2007 he became the first Korean comic artist seated as a full member of the Japan Cartoonists Association. He later served on the Korea Cartoonist Association board.
The obituary lands in a week when other manga and manhwa creators are still mid-career pivots, from Claymore’s Norihiro Yagi launching Bartlet Fairy Basslet on Shonen Jump+ to veterans renegotiating exclusives. Ha’s file is the finished kind: decades of martial-arts pages and a formal Japan–Korea comics handshake that outlived any single serialization.
ANN’s writeup does not detail funeral arrangements. For English readers, Goltong and Divine Sword and Evil Sword remain the works most often attached to his name.
Sixty-eight is young for a board member who was still a reference point for martial-arts manhwa craft. The association’s notice, relayed through Yonhap, is the formal record: Seung-nam Ha died Nov. 2, 2026.
Ha’s Japan Cartoonists Association membership in 2007 remains a milestone for Korean creators working across the sea. Combined with Taiwan serializations and Japanese magazine shorts, his career mapped a practical pan-Asian path before webtoon platforms made border-hopping feel routine.
English-language obituaries will likely keep returning to Goltong and Divine Sword and Evil Sword as the entry titles. For colleagues on the Korea Cartoonist Association board, the loss is closer: a peer who apprenticed in the old studio system and lived long enough to sit in the trade’s formal rooms.
