A story made to be shared.

Ji-Yoon Park has opinions about heroes. Especially the ones with sponsorships, carefully managed reputations, and a camera nearby. Becoming one herself was never the plan.

Set in South Korea, Hana Radiance follows a teenage girl balancing friendships, a life of her own, and powers that make keeping a low profile increasingly difficult. She’s sarcastic, skeptical, and much more compassionate than she’d probably like you to notice. When someone needs help, she has a hard time walking away.

Unfortunately, helping people gets complicated in a city where public image can matter more than public good. Celebrity heroes attract sponsorships. Politicians promise order. People struggling to get by become problems to move somewhere else. Ji-Yoon keeps noticing the people who disappear from everyone else’s version of the story.

There’s action, humor, friendship, and the occasional deeply inconvenient attempt to have a normal weekend. Beneath it all are questions about power, inequality, belonging, and who gets protected when keeping people safe becomes a business.

Being a hero might mean standing up to a villain. It might also mean questioning why everyone seems comfortable with the way things are.

There’s something powerful about the desire to create—to take an idea that exists only in your head and give it a life beyond you. To leave something behind that says a little about who you were, what mattered to you, and what you hoped for.

For a long time, I enjoyed writing without turning it into anything I could share. Eventually, I decided to make something for myself and my daughter, Merrick. I wasn’t setting out to become famous. I wanted to create a world she could see herself in, where someone inspired by her got to be the hero.

I became a dad at 40. I’m an attorney by trade, and writing has always given me somewhere to put the part of my brain that wants to invent things. Hana Radiance gave that impulse a direction. Ji-Yoon started with my daughter, then gradually became her own person: sarcastic, compassionate, suspicious of attention, and unwilling to leave people in trouble.

Spider-Man and Kamala Khan are two of my favorite heroes, and their influence is probably easy to spot. I’ve loved comics since the ’90s, especially stories where extraordinary abilities complicate an already difficult life. Being able to save someone doesn’t mean you know what to say to your best friend afterward. That’s the kind of territory I wanted to explore with Ji-Yoon.

Her Korean background opened another door. I’m half Korean; my mother immigrated to the United States, and I was born here. Korea has always been part of my heritage, but there’s a great deal about it I’ve never known. Writing Ji-Yoon’s world has given me a reason to ask questions, research, and discover things I might otherwise have gone my whole life without learning.

What began as something for Merrick and me has become much more than I expected. It’s challenged me to think about my own beliefs, learn about my heritage, and grow as a writer and a person. It’s also been a lot of fun. Whatever eventually comes of Hana Radiance, making it has already brought me more joy than I could have anticipated.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. I hope you find something to love in Ji-Yoon’s world, and that her story brings you some of the joy it’s brought me to create it.

— Michael Bane